The success of Mad Men kicked them off, evidently. It started off with similar First Turning shows:
- Pan Am - International stewardesses when that was a big deal
- Magic City - Miami casinos
- Mob City - 1947 Los Angeles
- The Playboy Club - Well, yeah. Chicago, if it matters.
Most of them haven't done especially well - these all started in or after 2011 and only Mob City is still around. There's also Masters of Sex, although based on minimal viewing it appears to be more about the sex researchers themselves than an exploration of their era. (Although looking at them is going to be a lot about their era in any case.)
The Americans is a notable Second Turning series - although Mad Men has been solidly there for the last few seasons, and the recently launched Halt and Catch Fire is from the same period. It's also notable for not being about "the Sixties," which is a default 2T story location, unless the focus is on Nixon. Looking at the early Eighties - The Americans starts soon after Reagan's inauguration - the traces could still be seen in reactions to what was seen as nuclear brinksmanship. The Day After and Special Bulletin; protests about cruise missiles and Pershing IIs; Nuclear-Free Zones: All were objections to the status quo based on articles of personal belief... and were effectively obsolete by the end of the decade.
Manhattan is different in that it in the Fourth Turning. One could count Band of Brothers as the first 20th Century 4T television series, although it's about the military in a war, which has been very well-explored. The people working on the atomic bomb were exceptional, but they would have had to deal with the Crisis in a way similar to others who weren't in war zones.What folks on the home front were doing hasn't been shown - a (non-documentary) television example doesn't come to mind at all, in fact.
Hopefully, it will be good and there will be more like it. Well-done examples might be very helpful to us in this Crisis, here.
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