(Credit: Netflix)

Netflix has achieved several major coups in terms of flagship TV series from the noughties lately, and Mad Men is the latest. Its protagonist Don Draper is the all-American vision of a successful man in the 1960s. A charismatic, charming ad man heading up the creative division of fictional Madison Avenue firm Sterling Cooper, he has a picture-perfect wife and two kids, and a large family home in resplendent New York suburbia. Except all’s not what it seems.

From the get-go, it becomes clear that Draper is more smarm than charm, with Fargo actor Jon Hamm peeling back the layers gently enough to keep us on our toes. But his character’s charisma is, in fact, a fig-leaf for erratic tendencies and an entire life spent acting out a lie. He’s a serial adulterer, who in turn snoops on his wife’s private doctors visits. And his entire world of chauvinistic deceit and overbearing control threatens to come crashing down when his estranged brother Adam asks to meet him.

“What do you want from me?” Draper asks impatiently. “Dick, I thought you were dead,” Adam replies. “And you’re right here.” Draper tries to dismiss him out of hand. “That’s not me.” But Adam keeps probing. “Donald Draper? What kind of name is that?” Draper doesn’t deny what he did. That he changed his name. That he left his old life behind when Adam was just eight years old. Even that he’s missed him in the meantime.

But ultimately he has no interest in reconnecting, either with his old identity or with his brother. “Listen to me,” he tells his Adam. “I have a life, and it goes in one direction only. Forward.” He pays him off with the only thing of value to him in his new life – money – and tells him never to come back. Adam heeds his words. The next time Draper hears about his brother, he’s hanged himself.

So, who is Dick?

It takes four more years for the truth about Draper’s old life to find its way into his marriage, destroying whatever was left of it following his numerous affairs and controlling behaviour towards his wife, Betty. She discovers a box containing two family histories – one real and one stolen – in the locked drawer of his desk at home, after he accidentally left the key in his bathrobe.

Draper has no other choice but to spill the beans. His real name is Dick Whitman. As a teenager he “ran away to join the army”, and ended up serving in the Korean War. “There was an accident and this guy was killed, and I was injured,” he explains. “But they made a mistake, and all I had to do was be him and I could leave Korea.”

“You took his name?” Betty asks, horrified. “I found out it was easier to be him than to start over,” her husband reason. “And it turned out he was married to that woman,” he adds, referring to Anna Draper, the real Don’s wife with whom Betty suspects him of cheating on her. “So I took care of her. And then I divorced her, and then I met you.”

Betty quickly pulls him up on a further lie he’s telling. “You divorced her on Valentine’s Day, 1953. Three months before we got married,” she retorts, having done her homework. The conversation ends with her telling him, “I don’t know who you are.” And so, Draper, or Whitman, goes back to the very beginning.

He takes out some old photographs of his childhood, and goes through them with Betty. “My mother was a 22-year-old prostitute who died having me,” he explains. His father then died when he was ten, and he didn’t get on with his stepmother Abigail. “They’re all dead,” he concludes. Even Adam, the “little boy” his wife has spotted alongside him in the pictures.

While Betty pities her husband as he sobs with guilt over abandoning his half-brother, her ability to tolerate their marriage has already reached breaking point. Dick Whitman will remain Don Draper to most people in the world of advertising, but for those closest to him, the truth is too much to take.