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Everyone in This TV Show Should Be Smoking

Any period piece set between 1800 and 2000 that isn’t choked by cigarette haze is fundamentally compromised.

When Kristen Wiig ’s Maxine Dellacorte sits poolside reading the local society pages or Allison Janney’s Evelyn rocks a pair of sunglasses big and bold enough to get filched by Truman Capote, you feel as if you’re looking at a spread from an old magazine in a vintage store that’s come alive. Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted, set in 1963, doesn’t have any smoking at all, even from Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, who’d been brought back for a surprise cameo that got everything else about the character wrong including putting him in a suit that didn’t fit. A few recent period films are properly wreathed, including Oppenheimer, Asteroid City, Licorice Pizza, and Saltburn, which is set in 2006, the beginning of the end of casually expressive, commonplace cigarette smoking in real life.

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