Television is incestuous. Every prestige drama is a sitcom’s bastard child, every reality show has a soap opera godparent, and sometimes a cartoon rabbit is secretly raising your favourite feminist antihero. TV doesn’t evolve in straight lines — it cannibalises itself, mutates, and dresses the same archetypes in new costumes. That’s where Unhinged TV Family Trees comes in.

One is television’s brooding antihero, drowning in whiskey and neuroses. The other is a bumbling sitcom husband forever foiled by his wife’s nose twitch. But they share a job title — ad men — and that job is the connective tissue that makes Mad Men a direct descendant of Bewitched.

In the 1960s, Bewitched turned advertising into farce. Darren’s job was ridiculous: endless pitches for soap and cereal, always disrupted by Samantha’s magic. The show satirised the idea that Madison Avenue was glamorous.

Mad Men did the same, just with prestige drama’s poker face. Don’s pitches were treated like theatre, but the products were equally absurd — lipstick, cigarettes, beans. The difference? Darren had a witch to fix his mistakes. Don just had Peggy, Joan, and a lot of cigarettes.

Here’s where the parallels sharpen. Samantha’s magic was always the solution, even when Darren took the credit. Likewise, in Mad Men, women like Peggy and Joan did the invisible labour that made the men look brilliant. Bewitched said it with nose twitches; Mad Men said it with quiet fury. Same critique, different tone.

Both shows are about insecure men who think they’re running the world when they’re barely holding their lives together. Darren feared exposure as a fraud. Don feared exposure as a fraud. Darren covered it with laugh tracks; Don covered it with whiskey and affairs. But the archetype is the same: the ad man as paper tiger.

The genius of Bewitched was its ability to smuggle social critique into a sitcom. The genius of Mad Men was its ability to smuggle the same critique into a prestige tragedy. Both used advertising as the ultimate metaphor: an industry that sells illusions while falling for its own lies.

So yes, Don Draper is just Darren Stephens stripped of Samantha’s magic. Imagine if Darren came home one day and Samantha had left — no spells, no nose twitches, no safety net. That’s Mad Men. Same job, same absurdity, but now the man is fully exposed, drowning in the emptiness of the world he’s selling.

Because in the end, both shows remind us: advertising is a con, masculinity is a performance, and the witch (or the secretary) is the only reason anything ever works.