The new season of Mad Men is upon us. The official posters, with Don looking at a psychedelic print, aren’t out-and-out historical gaffes like this Netflix ad, but they point to a lot of the problems the show had last season.

Mad Men started out as fundamentally a show about hierarchies. (“It’s a hierarchy!” Ken cried desperately in this season’s premier.) Well, it was — and largely still is. In the pilot, Peggy’s first day tour of the office showed us the lay of the land in all its beautiful horror. We knew part of the long arc would be about how the people at the top — whom we had more or less been asked to identify with — had their positions challenged.

But the show’s strength was always in showing the everyday cruelties of the old order. Many of the best episodes, like “The Gold Violin” from season two, or “Signal 30” from season five, have the feel of a certain kind of old school New Yorker story. As Vivian Gornick described it in “The End of the Novel of Love”: