I was watching Mad Men the other day (we’re still watching season 1 on DVD, so, please, no spoilers in the comments) and it struck me that just about none of the characters on the show are in their forties (on average, the unhappiest time in people’s lives, according to Andrew Oswald’s research). Almost everyone is in their 20s and 30s, with a few kids and a few people in their 50s and up.

This is just one show, of course. The last show I watched, The Sopranos, was full of fortysomethings. But it got me wondering what the ages are of characters on various fictional and dramatic productions. It would be fun to have a big pile of this information and then play with it in various ways.

Once you start with this, of course, there’s all sorts of things you could go around tabulating. If anybody out there happens to do such an analysis (or knows of something out there already), please let me know.