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It never felt dark to me, though, because I love the cringe-y comedy, because that’s the stuff you relate to. I love laughing at stuff where you go, “Oh, that’s happened to me, and it’s so funny to see that.” It just felt very real to me. The moment I realized we were in trouble—I’ve told this story before—I was talking to one of the critics, and he had watched that episode, and he goes, “You know, Nick walks into that audition, and I just had to leave the room, I couldn’t watch it.” I was like, “Why? That’s the funniest thing in the world, to watch a guy tank an audition.”

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It may seem unfair to pick on Mad Men for its language inaccuracies; after all, Shakespeare’s characters spoke highly untraditional English, and great shows like Deadwood routinely ran roughshod over any form of linguistic accuracy. But the careful balance of anachronism, in all its forms, is at the heart of the Mad Men’s mechanics far more than Shakespeare’s. We watch the show to revel in the foreignness of the recent past. The drinking, the smoking, the leering, and even the personal reserve all remind us that the modern world isn’t the only one. (This can be a problem, as Benjamin Schwarz wrote in The Atlantic after season two; it can be hard to be enveloped in a world so deliberately off-putting.) Weiner even deliberately plays with anachronisms: At the very end of the show’s first season, set in 1960, Don Draper returns home hoping to see his picture-perfect family in front of him. Instead he finds an empty house, and the season fades to black to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” It works perfectly well as a score for an abandoned husband; but knowing that the song wasn’t released for another three years adds the weight of the shift in decades to Draper’s plight. Weiner explained the choice to the Times as an attempt to outline the future of the show if it were cancelled.

Given that, the modern sound of Mad Men is certainly a flaw, if a minor one. It makes us feel more at home just where we shouldn’t. That raises an interesting question: can even the most common phrases disturb the environment if the vocabulary is too heavily weighted towards the modern? What seems to be the most ubiquitous mistake in Mad Men is so frequent as to be invisible: the phrase “I need to.” Modern scripts set in 1960s, including Mad Men, use it constantly: it’s about as frequent as everyday words like “good,” “between,” or “most.” But to say “I need to” so much is a surprisingly modern practice: books, television shows, and movies from the 1960s use it at least ten times less often, and many never use it all. Sixties dialogue written back then used “ought to” far more often than modern imitators do. I checked several movies and TV seasons from 1960 to 1965, and all use “ought to” more often than “need to”; every modern show I could find set in the ’60s does the reverse.

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Even more than anachronism, a core theme of Mad Men is the lost art of personal reserve, self-effacement, and mystery. When Don Draper says, "Tell Jimmy I need to talk to him" in season 2 instead of "I have to talk to him," it hits a slightly more narcissistic, self-revealing note than it should. A baby boomer might set up a business meeting by invoking his personal needs; but a member of the "silent generation"—particularly one living a double life like Draper—doesn't talk about himself quite so readily. If Mad Men used "need to" at the 60s rate, all those characteristics would be stronger.