Everything you said is pretty spot on. Not to mention, what you said about Matt Weiner does explain why there's no real central plot to Mad Men. At the same time, how about Breaking Bad? It does a good job of reminding you "OH HEY! IT'S THE SOUTHWEST, WHERE THERE ARE MEXICAN CRIMINAL DRUG ACTIVITIES AND MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE? " And within that same vein, Breaking Bad has shown just as much moral ambiguity as Mad Men - granted, not within the same vein or to the same extremes, but it still blurs the lines between right/wrong, good/evil by making you care for characters that cross those lines.

Yet, comparing Breaking Bad to Mad Men is like comparing lobster to steak. They're both damn good, damn highbrow stuff to the palate, but at the same time they're both two different things bringing two different types of elements to the table.

Mad Men would be the steak. A delicacy, thick and juicy full of the meat of gossip, scandal, secrecy and love affairs. It looks delicious, smells delicious, and we know it's going to be delicious. Mad Men does the same thing -- without it's 1960s mise-en-scene, it'd be nothing about another soap opera.

Breaking Bad would be the lobster. Do you know that lobster used to be a peasant food because of its overabundance and the fact that lobster were literal bottom feeders of the sea? Breaking Bad is very much the same way - about people living in poverty, stuck with the methheads (the bottom feeders, if you will) of the streets. Yet, they're both consumed (and I use consume in the sense that we consume media and, yes, the way we consume food as well) as highbrow entertainment - cooked, prepared, and made in a specficic way that makes both of their experiences novel, in spite of their lower-class background, and rewarding to the palate.

Your essential attack on Mad Men is it's 1960s setting - the fact that the mise-en-scene does such a good job of reminding you that they're in the 1960s. I completely understand what you mean, but I believe we both come from a generation that didn't grow up around that time. In fact, a lot of that stuff is foreign to us, so we notice it a lot more. Within the show, it's a normal thing for them, seeing all these newspapers and snippets - but for us, of course we notice, it's different time from ours, essentially a different world - and anyway they connect their worlds to ours, it's a bit disruptive. But at the same time, I feel it's meant to remind us about the degree of realism the show has in connection to our real world.

Maybe the reason the show's execution of its mise-en-scene is not because of it's lack of "elegance," but rather the fact that the time period is so different than ours, that it stands out to us more.