Building a Timeline for Mad Men's Pilot

We finally know the exact date of Mad Men Season 1: Episode 1

What drew my intial interest to Mad Men was the respect that the show paid to history.

I knew that the creative team looked up weather records down to the hour to ensure that they were capturing the 1960s exactly. It wasn’t just about playing the right songs and giving the actresses big hair, there was a duty here to ensuring that what you saw onscreen was the 1960s and not a fantasy vision of the past.

This dedication to history got me thinking, when exactly does Mad Men’s pilot take place? We know from a wall calender seen during Peggy’s visit to the doctor that the show’s first episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” takes place in March.

(© AMC)

From researching the weather records of that month, I have determined that the episode takes place from the night of March 29th to the night of March 30th, 1960.

Here is a companion timeline page for the episode:

And here is a breakdown of how I determined the timeline of the first episode…