Is Don Draper the Devil?

Why are the evil ones always so good-looking? Mary McNamara of The Los Angeles Times argues that Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), the criminally handsome leading man of AMC's Mad Men, is, in fact, the devil. McNamara paints Draper as the deftest of liars and manipulators, a cheating, heartless dynamo motivated solely by self-interest. "Don lies to everyone all the time,” she writes. “And unlike TV's many other antiheroes, he manages to look Dorian-Gray-great doing it.” Calling him “morally bankrupt even by the standards of the period” for his affairs, both in and out of the office, she says he is “one of those guys who manages to seem as if he's trying to do the right thing when that is not his intention at all.”