In the end, Don Draper didn't find inner peace in Los Angeles. He found it in Big Sur, and then immediately sold it, which basically adds up to the same thing. Throughout Mad Men, which ended this past weekend after seven seasons, Los Angeles was Don's escape (at least until Megan moved to the canyons), but behind the scenes it was also pretty much everything else: while the series was set mostly in New York, it was shot almost entirely around Los Angeles.
A lot of the most memorable locations—the apartments, the offices—were sets, but Mad Men also used dozens of real Southern California restaurants, hotels, theaters, houses, and more. (The set for SC&P's late-sixties office in Beverly Hills is aspirationally old school and stuffy, but the region did eventually got around to appreciating its mid-century greatness.) Here we've mapped 40 SoCal locations used in the series; this isn't quite everything, so let us know what we've missed.
*A commenter points out that we forgot to credit the person responsible for finding mid-century New York hiding throughout Los Angeles: R. Scott Poole was the location manager for all 92 episodes of the series.
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