.

[Sol]

I do think Mad Men has a bit more discussion of religion than perhaps you're giving it credit for--I'm thinking in particular of the storyline in the 2nd season with Peggy and Colin Hanks. It's fairly clear that Peggy rejects the strict mores and guilt of the Church to a fairly large extent, but she's still influenced enough by Father Gil's suggestion of confession to admit her baby out of wedlock to Pete, even as she rebukes him. There's also of course fairly frequent discussion of Jewishness, though of course a lot of that comes through in a non-religious context.

Still, it's fair to say that Mad Men's not a super religiously attuned show--which in a lot of ways reflects the particular slice of society the show samples--famously secular and non-Protestant New York before the Fourth Great Awakening really picked up speed.

[Sol]

I do think Mad Men has a bit more discussion of religion than perhaps you're giving it credit for--I'm thinking in particular of the storyline in the 2nd season with Peggy and Colin Hanks. It's fairly clear that Peggy rejects the strict mores and guilt of the Church to a fairly large extent, but she's still influenced enough by Father Gil's suggestion of confession to admit her baby out of wedlock to Pete, even as she rebukes him. There's also of course fairly frequent discussion of Jewishness, though of course a lot of that comes through in a non-religious context.

Still, it's fair to say that Mad Men's not a super religiously attuned show--which in a lot of ways reflects the particular slice of society the show samples--famously secular and non-Protestant New York before the Fourth Great Awakening really picked up speed.

These are good points. Religion is not completely ignored by Mad Men, although it's notable that it focuses on the same Catholicism/Judaism/Western Buddhism triad that I describe with respect to The Sopranos.

Don Draper also has that great moment in the final season when he sees the devil in the engineer who comes in to install the firm's new computer. Admittedly, the thrust of this scene is that Don is having a drunken outburst, but the form it takes is significant.

Maybe it's my own biases speaking, but I view this as one of the most important moments in the series and particularly crucial to the moment of revelation at the end in which he conceives of the Buy the World a Coke campaign. Don understands the cold and mechanized Tower of Babel that we are building for ourselves and the allure of offering an escape from that in something human.

I think the Catholic/Judaism/Western Buddhism aspect, as shared with the Sopranos, is mostly a side effect of the Tri-State area setting, though unlike the Sopranos Mad Men does of course have lots of WASP or North European characters who'd theoretically be Protestant. Though it's fairly realistic in showing most of those characters as thoroughly secularized.

It's been a minute since I've seen the back half of Mad Men to be honest, which I watched when it was airing while I was in High School and haven't rewatched since. I'm currently rewatching (early Season 3) and will probably come back to this thread once I get to that scene.

[Sol]

I have had this thought in the context of my being unable to relate to any character I have ever seen on TV. It's not that there's a lack of characters on television identified as Muslim (in fact, there are far more than the proportion of Muslims in the United States would suggest), but it appears to me that all of them are shown to be irreligious or in some significant way non-practicing. Maybe the intended purpose is to humanize those characters in the way that the writers know how, but its effect is to render those characters unrecognizable to me.

You see something similar in terms of the paucity of Mormon characters; there would be no way to guess from American non-sports television programming that there are as many Mormons in the United States as there are Jews. The sense I get is that for a character to be religiously secure forecloses on a great deal of dramatic potential and does not add anything useful in exchange.

That gets to the question of why it might be that religious characters could be difficult. My notion here (and this is speculative even compared to everything else) is that the sort of person who thinks in a serious way about the moral questions on which religion might have bearing is unlikely to turn to creating fiction if they have personal religious experience. More narrowly, I would think that it would be uncommon for religious people of this sort to become television writers. What leads me to believe this is that I have encountered very few fictional depictions (television or otherwise) of the experience of living with religious fate that have felt to me that they were based on any actual experiences on the part of the author. The Sopranos is an outlier in this respect; Carmela's religious experiences feel founded in real life.

The Sopranos does benefit from its religion being the one sort of religion that Hollywood has experience depicting. Since we've talked about Mad Men, we can bring up the one point that bothers the sort of person who posts on this site to no end: Peggy's family, despite being repeatedly identified as Norwegian, is shown to be Catholic. You can come up with ways to explain this away if you want, but it's something that does need to be explained away, and it suggests that that was the only kind of organized religion that the writers had any sense of how to depict.

This is pedantic, but it's clearly stated in Mad Men that Peggy's father was Norwegian and her mother is Irish Catholic.

I do think that has the scent of Matthew Weiner back-filling with a plausible but a bit contrived explanation, a bit like how it's initially implied that Joan and Roger had only been having an affair for a year but then it's retconned that they had been on and off again for many years. Mad Men is a show which is sociologically attuned to a really uniquely strong degree so you can really tell that something is a bit off, as in this case.

[Sol]

Why is it so rare to find complex depictions of religious characters and stories that take religion seriously?

Because this would appeal to a very niche audience, and there's no reason for TV producers to purposefully put themselves in this kind of corner.

Most Americans are religious. And there's no reason to assume that nonreligious people wouldn't be interested in such stories.