How to Watch Mad Men in 2020: Back to the Sixties

Interested in knowing what life was like in the early 60s for people not in the counterculture? Mad Men has you covered. It follows the bizarre doings of Don Draper, a New York ad executive, and his colleagues as they make their way through a very confusing decade. To make sure you can also follow it, we’ve put together this guide on how to watch Mad Men.

As the intro of Mad Men season 1, episode 1 says, the title refers to the ad executives, who dubbed themselves “mad” for the hectic lifestyle they were living while working on Madison Avenue. Besides working like crazy, they drank, gambled, and fornicated their way through life while their wives patiently waited for them to come home, ether in fancy Manhattan apartments or in houses in the Jersey suburbs.

Don Draper is pretty much the standard bearer for this lifestyle. Played by Jon Hamm, Draper stands tall, has a chin as square as a chopping block and can talk his way in or out of everything. Behind this chiseled, everyman exterior, though, he is wracked by secrets and desires even he barely understands.

He’s not the only one. Pretty much the whole dramatis personae is made up of complicated characters with strong arcs that go through all that America in the 60s can throw at them, and come out on the other side, changed. 

If this combination of period piece and truly excellent writing sounds like the kind of thing you can curl up on the couch for during a few weekends, read on as we show you how to watch Mad Men online.

How to Watch Mad Men Online

Mad Men originally aired on AMC, home of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but the network doesn’t have much of a streaming site of its own, mostly just showing a few of its latest episodes and related shorts. There seems to be a deal in place with Netflix, however, so most, if not all, AMC shows can be found there. Mad Men is no exception.

We checked several countries’ Netflix site using a virtual private network and found Mad Men in all of them, and all seven seasons, too. The only thing that differed between countries were the subtitles available. If you want to watch Mad Men, Netflix is your best bet; you may want to check out our article on the best Netflix hacks to make the most of the experience, though.

If you’re in a country that we didn’t check and Mad Men happens to not be there, or even if you simply need subtitles not available in the country you’re in, then you’re going to need a VPN to spoof your location to a country of your choosing. To novice’s ears, this may sound a lot more complicated than it is, so we’ll explain.

A VPN is a program that reroutes your internet connection and encrypts it, making it so you can appear to be anywhere your service of choice has a server and be more secure, to boot. They’re pretty handy tools to have, but not just any VPN will work with Netflix thanks to the VPN ban. If you want to try out how it works, check out our best VPN for Netflix article.

How to Watch Mad Men for Free

VPNs also come in handy if you decide to go an illegal route to watching Mad Men, rather than Netflix. Illegal streaming sites, like WatchSeries or PutLocker, are free to use, but often come with security risks. If you decide to visit either of them, you will need to use one of the best VPN for streaming or risk exposing yourself to viruses and malware.

Thing is, while these sites are very convenient, they still need to make money even without subscribers. They do so by bombarding you with ads, some of which contain malicious cookies. Besides using a VPN, you may also want to install one of the best pop-up blockers and some antivirus software before venturing there.

With this disclaimer out of the way, we took a look at a few streaming sites and were surprised to find Mad Men is pretty hard to find. Our usual go-to, PutLocker, didn’t carry it, which is odd since it has a lot of other, much more obscure shows, such as The Shield and Timeless.

WatchSeries, however, does have Mad Men, but watching it there will be an exercise in frustration because, even with all the protections in place, you’ll still be faced with a lot of page redirects and pop-ups. Guess that’s just the price of free.

How to Watch Mad Men on Kodi

A much more pleasant route may be to install Kodi and watch Mad Men that way. Kodi was initially developed as a media streaming platform for the Xbox, but now is available for pretty much every device out there. Check out our full Kodi guide to get started using it. 

As usual, we first opened the Poseidon add-on and found Mad Men there, all seven seasons. If you don’t have Poseidon yet, it’s under one of the best Kodi repositories, Kodil, and has pretty much every show out there in it. However, as this is copyright infringement, you want to have one of the best VPN for Kodi engaged before sailing the low seas of piracy.

Mad Men Torrents

Speaking of straight-up piracy, we still very much like the old-school rules of torrenting. Of course, you’ll need to use one of the best VPN for torrenting when using P2P file sharing or face some very stiff fines, but the upside is that you’ll have Mad Men living on your hard drive, ideal if you don’t have the most stable internet connection.

The Pirate Bay has more torrents of Mad Men you can shake a stick at, with both seasons available separately or even the whole show in one go (that’ll take a while to download, though). Most uploads seem to be of good quality, too, though it always pays to read all the comments first.

Final Thoughts

Mad Men is a character-driven show with good stories and an intriguing look at a world that has all but disappeared in just a few decades. We recommend it to anybody looking for a slow burn filled with mystery, and the above tips will help you watch it online with ease.

What do you think of Mad Men? Too slow or just right? Let us know in the comments below, as well as any tips you may have that we didn’t mention. Thank you for reading.