• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 12, 2015

Quite an effort was evidently expended to ship hundreds of “Mad Men”-related objects both large and small from L.A. to New York for a museum exhibition coinciding with the arrival of the final seven episodes of this storied TV series about 1960s admen and adwomen.

The final episodes of “Mad Men” begin on Sunday, April 5, winding up on May 17. This “Mad Men” exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image (MMI) opens this Saturday (March 14) and runs for three months through June 14. Members of the press got a pre-opening tour of the exhibition on Tuesday.

The show is formally titled “Matthew Weiner’s 'Mad Men'" -- not only because Weiner is the creator of the show, but because he was apparently personally involved in wrangling this exhibition’s many parts. 

The largest of the “set pieces” he okayed for exhibition are examples of the sets themselves that have been transported and then reassembled and installed in their entirety in the exhibition space at the MMI, located in Astoria, Queens, a few minutes by subway from Manhattan. 

The reconstituted sets are the unofficial centerpieces of the show because these are the two areas of the exhibition that are likely to elicit the most oohs and ahs from “Mad Men” fans who come to see it.

The biggest of these are Don Draper’s office and the suburban kitchen of Don and Betty Draper (before they were divorced). These sets have been reassembled in great detail.

Don’s office contains all the large pieces of furniture viewers know from the show -- his desk, his couch, his sideboard, his rolling bar -- but it’s also substantially dressed with all the bric-a-brac you would expect to see there too, right down to the cigarette butts.

The kitchen too is similarly outfitted in detail -- cigarette butts in an ashtray, cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator, a handful of paperback novels piled on their sides (the top one: the 1960s bestseller “Up the Down Staircase” by Bel Kaufman) and dozens (if not hundreds) of other items. 

Also on view: A desk that might have been the workspace of office manager Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), complete with all the accoutrements of 1960s office work -- pens, pencils, a stapler, tape dispenser, paper clips and everything else that was needed to help organize the pre-paperless offices of the era.

Just as grandiose as the kitchen and office sets is a completely reassembled “Mad Men” writers’ room complete with conference table -- not a set from the show, but the actual furnishings from the room in which the show’s writers collaborated on scripts.

For many visitors, the costumes on display will also represent a highlight of the show. Many outfits -- both male and female -- are on display on mannequins, including one entire section devoted to the outfits of Betty Draper.

Elsewhere in the exhibition are glass cases filled with production notes and vintage ’60s-era products. The walls are festooned with advertising, and TV screens placed throughout the exhibition play key scenes from the series.

Some of the objects included by Wiener, 49, are very personal -- including photos from the 1960s and ’70s of himself and members of his family, plus at least one glass case filled with brief production notes he scribbled to himself on notepad stationery from both “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos,” the show he worked on previously. 

This exhibition is so dense with objects from the 1960s that were once commonplace but have long since disappeared from our everyday lives that it can be challenging to take it all in. But try to take it in anyway. If you loved “Mad Men,” then this museum show is well worth your attention.

The other day, TV columnists – including yours truly – received a DVD from AMC with the first of the new “Mad Men” episodes, which I watched yesterday (Wednesday). How was it? I wish I could tell you, but I am prevented from writing anything about it because AMC has placed an embargo on columns and reviews until March 23. Stay tuned.