Don Draper Is George Costanza. George Costanza Is Don Draper

If you think about it, who is Jon Hamm but a taller, hairier, better-dressed Jason Alexander?

On paper, the similarities between George Costanza from Seinfeld and the tall, dark and handsome Don Draper in Mad Men don’t exactly jump out at you – while Don is cool, confident and continually successful in almost all his major business dealings, George is nebbishy timid and so inconsistently employed that he lives with his parents. Hell, Don doesn’t even have parents!

However, when you look beneath the surface, you see in both men a cynical, crafty and perpetually unsatisfied misanthrope who believes he can game his way into happiness at the expense of whatever soul he once had. Though the results of their maneuvering may differ, Don and George see and treat the world around them in the exact same way. One can only assume that, were Don ever directly asked if he believed in God, his response would be something along the lines of, “I do for the bad things.”

A recent thread on Twitter made the bold assertion that George and Don are so similar that the plotlines of any Mad Men episode and any George-heavy Seinfeld story could switch the two characters for each other without changing a thing…

Now I want to know how ol' Donny D would try to better brand “shrinkage.”