Pop Culture’s All-Time Top 10 Ad Men: How Draper-esque Are They?

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

How much more un-Draperesque does it get than making a Herculean effort to get home to a wife and kids? Steve Martin’s Page doesn’t show much of Draper’s inventive panache as he just sits on his hands for two hours while a cosmetics executive mulls over his ad. Page is no womanizer. The only person he shares a bed with on his cross-county odyssey is John Candy’s Del, though—those aren’t pillows—he does get pretty intimate. Despite the trauma of rerouted flights, broken trains, and flambéed automobiles, Page turns down several convivial drinks, before finally downing some airline alcohol bottles of alcohol with Del.

TOTAL: 4 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Planes, Trains And Automobiles]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

Don Draper may take risks, but not even he would make this leap. Expecting a promotion to senior VP, Albert Brooks’ Howard is asked to transfer to New York to work on the Ford account. Instead he quits, liquidates his assets, and with his wife sets off to find himself and America. After she loses all their money in Vegas, we see Howard at work, pitching the casino boss to give their money back, to show “The Desert Inn Has Heart.” Howard’s pitch falls on deaf ears and disillusioned he heads the RV toward New York and gets his job back—alas with a 31% reduction in salary. In the end, even after his wife loses the nest egg, Howard doesn’t touch a drink or another woman.

TOTAL: 5 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Lost In America]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

Mad Men touched on the Civil Rights movement, but Sterling Cooper and Partners is pretty homogenous, racially speaking. In the pilot episode of this contemporary ABC comedy, Dre’s (Anthony Anderson) workplace is diverse, but there’s still a divide. When Dre is made senior VP of the urban division (or as he calls it “black stuff”), he has a crisis of conscience but ultimately he can showcase his skills from this unique vantage. Dre is a devoted husband and family man and while he’ll have a Dre has a drink with dinner, gone are the days of the bar cart in the office. Heck, even the firm’s Christmas party is a kid-oriented affair (no riding mowers allowed).

TOTAL: 7 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Black-ish]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

It’s impossible to separate Timothy Busfeld’s Elliot and Ken Olin’s Michael, so we’ll have to judge them as a whole. While Michael remains faithful to his wife through the series run, Elliot reveals in the pilot he’s strayed and it’s not until he nearly gets divorced and his wife gets cancer that he straightens out. The two drink throughout the series, but rarely to excess. As for their creative capabilities, we see plenty of ups and downs in their career as they go from their own boutique agency to the craziness at D.A.A., where Michael has to fire Elliot, and in the end enough overwrought anguish to make things at Sterling Cooper and Partners look like a sitcom.

TOTAL: 7 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream thirtysomething]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

Dustin Hoffman’s titular Kramer begins the movie like a Draper clone; a rising star having just been handed a huge airline account. He stays at work late and even calls the office the minute he gets home, ignoring his wife who is leaving him. From that moment, though, Kramer’s son becomes his focus, so much so that he’s fired (it’s revealed in the custody trial that he walked out during a presentation to meet with a teacher). Ted will have a drink here and there, but seems more interested in Tab than Tanqueray. You’d expect a newly single man to be more sexually active, but beyond a romp with his co-worker, Ted is chaste.

TOTAL: 8 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Kramer Vs. Kramer]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

If not for the whole married to a witch thing (insert Betty Draper joke here), Bewitched at times feels like a blueprint for Mad Men. Drinking? Darrin is in a bar in the pilot and the drinks continued to flow over the show’s eight seasons, with Darrin appearing drunk several times. Philandering? While Darrin never actually cheats on Samantha, on several occasions he is suspected of having affairs, usually, in classic sitcom fashion due to a simple misunderstanding. Ad-making? Darrin has the chops, but sometimes it’s hard to really judge how good an ad man Darrin is due to his wife and her magic relatives constantly meddling in his work.

TOTAL: 9 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Bewitched]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

The film opens with a Draper-esque romp with a flight attendant in the back row of coach, but it’s apparent quickly that the wise-cracking Hanks’ character couldn’t be any more different in the office from dour Don. As the new creative director of his agency, Basner shows he’s got the skills, landing a major airline client—and sleeping with the media buyer. Basner and his crew like a good drink, too, imbibing and working at the local sports bar. In the end we know Basner must be an ad man on par with Draper, because even after he blows it with the client (he won’t go the New York for a presentation because his father is having surgery) he keeps his job.

TOTAL: 11 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Nothing In Common]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

If Don Draper was cryogenically frozen and thawed out three decades later, you’d have Gibson’s Marshall, a man’s man and charmer, who doesn’t get into the office before 10 a.m., has a pack-a-day habit, and likes a good bottle of wine. Marshall loses out on his agency’s creative director job to—gasp, a woman—because while he’s been busy perfecting macho beer and bikini ads, the world of advertising has evolved. All that changes when an accident with a hair dryer and bathtub gives him the ability to read women’s thoughts. He ruthlessly uses his ability to land Nike’s women division, but in the end falls for his boss, confesses and loses his job but keeps the girl.

TOTAL: 11 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream What Women Want]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

In a bizarro TV universe, it’s not impossible to imagine Heather Locklear’s Amanda learning the ad game from an aging Draper. Amanda slept with so many characters on the show, they had to introduce new ones in later seasons ostensibly to give her more conquests. Although it was Amanda’s protégé and rival Allison who had the drinking problem, Amanda wasn’t beyond having a drink or two, witness her drunken seduction of Jake in season two. As for Amanda’s advertising acumen, there’s a reason she rises up through the ranks from at D & D before opening her own firm by the end of the series’ seven-season run.

TOTAL: 12 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream Melrose Place]

FORNICATING:

IMBIBING:

SELLING:

Kirk Douglas’ Anderson, an ultra-successful L.A. ad executive, appears to be cut from the same cloth as Don Draper, getting inspiration for the Zephyr cigarette campaign (“The Clean One”) from a mistresses’ coitus coughing fit, performing masterfully in front of the client, and carrying an XL flask in his briefcase. Impossibly, Anderson may be full of even more existential angst than Don, opening the film by steering his sports car under a semi-truck in a heartbroken suicide attempt. When he eventually collects his wits and makes it back to work, it’s clear he’s not cut out for the ad game anymore.

TOTAL: 14 DRAPERS

[Find out where to stream The Arrangement]

Alex Gordon (@alexgordon) is a Chicago-based freelance writer. His favorite commercial of all time is the Mean Joe Greene Coke ad.