The JFK motorcade, frames before shots are fired.

I’ve been watching Mad Men‘s current season with wide eyes, waiting for Hildy to burst into tears and snot all over Pete Cambell, screaming, “They killed the President!” Sunday night, it happened — and if there was anything surprising about how Weiner and Co. handled the event, it was how straightforward it was: just a bunch of people watching television, like on 9/11.

It made me wonder, most of all, about Mad Men‘s function. There was a point during the episode where Draper tried to tear Betty from the tube: he said something like, “We can’t just watch TV.” But for them — and for us — it’s all they can do. Television provides the only form of connection to the event, television is the experience regardless of the fact that it is “just watching TV.”

Sunday night’s episode was, more than anything, our experience of the JFK assassination. It crept slowly — we may not have even noticed it at first — but then we followed the narrative play by play, up until Lee Harvey Oswald got shot. I, too, now have a memory of being huddled around the television, watching Walter Cronkite take his glasses on and off. And my experience of the JFK assassination — now that I’ve had my experience of the JFK assassination — is perhaps no less valid than Betty Draper’s, both being mediated by the same technology. Furthermore, that technology itself is a device that collapses time, rendering the time past since 1963 silent. The assassination — as evidenced by the primacy of the Zapruder film — has no existence outside of the camera technology, nothing beyond the frame by frame celluloid homicide.

Death at the office.

I used to think that what was wonderful about Mad Men was its ability to portray the 1960s not in terms of “accuracy” or “legitimacy,” but on their own terms: revolving around Weiner and Co.’s thesis about the ’60s. I still think this could be true for the writers of the show. But for us — the audience — Mad Men could serve a different function: one where we relive the ’60s, where we experience the clothes, the cars, the drinking. Pure nostalgia, a nostalgia so earnest we want to shed Joan Hollaway’s tears. And just as the United States formed as a nation in the wake of JFK’s death, we form as a nation, in our mutual desire to hear the news and weep.