When I lived in Pasadena, just outside of Los Angeles, it was fun to see local spots pop up in TV shows, movies, and commercials. For a recent example, Apple TV+’s Shrinking is shot all over Pasadena.
As a Mad Men superfan, I’d sometimes take a stroll through the picturesque South Pasadena that includes the exterior of the Draper house during early MM seasons.
That got me thinking about where Mad Men took us when it wasn’t focused on Manhattan and the office doings on Madison Avenue.
Homelife in Ossining
The Ossining house is where we see Don Draper outside of work and where we learn much about his homelife with Betty, the kids, and their neighbors. It looks idyllic on the surface, but just underneath both Don and Betty are desperately unhappy and in a tragic way don’t really know each other all that well.
As their marriage craters, we see Betty spending time with friends – and even future husband Henry Francis – around Ossining, and also get to occasionally see locations such as the local country club.
Los Angeles and the lure of the west coast
LA represents escape and renewal on Mad Men, as New York City gets dirtier over the course of the decade and great weather and “good vibrations” of ‘60s SoCal beckoned.
When Don and Pete Campbell visit LA during “The Jet Set” (with filming locations again in Pasadena), we see Don bail out of his life for a spell with Joy and a motley crew of rich vagabonds. And soon we meet Anna Draper and learn much more about Dick Whitman’s complicated past.
And later in the series, Megan uses LA as her own escape hatch, signaling that her own unhappy marriage to Don would soon end.
Sterling Cooper sends Don and team on the road
Most of the other non-NYC locations we see throughout Mad Men are related to Sterling Cooper business trips. Occasionally they are exotic locations, such as when Don takes Betty along with him to meet Conrad Hilton in Rome (a brief happy interlude for the couple), and later when Don brings Megan to Hawaii to work on a pitch for Royal Hawaiian.
“Out of Town” mostly focuses on Don and Sal Romano visiting the London Fog factory in Baltimore (and getting into some shenanigans besides), and we visit Detroit a number of times late in the series as part of dealings with Chevrolet.
Flashbacks take us to Pennsylvania and KOREA
We learn much about Dick Whitman’s sad childhood and early years in Depression-era Pennsylvania via flashback, and one of the biggest reveals of the entire series comes by way of showing us what happened to the “real” Don Draper in Korea late in Season 1.
And very close to the end of the series, Don takes Sally and Bobby to the Pennsylvania whorehouse that he grew up in.
Northern Californiaand the series finale
A final sequence of episodes sees Don on the road, wealthy and newly divorced (again), adrift in the United States. After attempting to locate the waitress that he had a bizarre brief relationship with in New York and getting into a scrape in Oklahoma, he eventually makes his way to northern California.
In “Person to Person,” the Mad Men series finale, Don has a breakdown of sorts and is reluctantly dragged to a new age-y California retreat. In the final moments of the show, it’s implied that Don is set to undergo yet another reinvention – one that perhaps will involve creating one of the most iconic advertising campaigns of all time.