I keep coming back to Mad Men. I can't figure out why. I find every character detestable and my hate for the advertising business is only becoming further justified with every episode (I'm two away from being up-to-date).

But it's real. At least it feels that way, it's a world as foreign to me as the middle ages; men in sharp suits and a workplace of open-faced bigotry, naive nouveau riche, bitter drunk old money, and women paper-mache dolls holding clean whiskey glasses while showing off blossoming bosoms.

And through it all we watch Don Draper enact his incessant ambition. There is only one direction for this man (heavenward) and how can we not account for his success by his almost mythically mannish good looks and that stoic bellow of voice that may or may not have been treated so as to never quiver.

He is our hero but he is not good. He is our anti-hero but his faults aren't obvious. In every way Don Draper plays the system. He goes through the tiers of company success by the merit of his solid work, he provides for house and family unfalteringly, he is even true to those he works with fair to those who do well and punisher to those who need so.

And do we ever really consider Don Draper to be bigot womanizer? It's not a sense of entitlement that sends him to woman after woman while his wife retreats into depression alone at home. His sexuality is proof he is not content. He has everything of materiality and success and he is the epitome of a 1964-era man, and yet he is missing.

I think Don Draper is largely a myth created by his history of women. He has shaped himself into the magnet they see him as and yet in all the relationships we see him enact in the show we watch as he genuinely tries to approach and understand love. What does it mean for Don Draper to love someone besides himself? Maybe we like him so much because he is still a child, only one who thinks he is all grown-up.