Ken Cosgrove

Ken Cosgrove arrives at Sterling Cooper as a sharp young account man, one of Pete Campbell's rivals for the same rung of the ladder. He's easygoing, well-liked, quietly confident, and unlike most of his colleagues he has an actual outside life — he writes short stories and gets them published, almost as a private joke on the whole ad business.

Ken works because he's the counterexample the show needs: proof that ambition and decency aren't mutually exclusive. Staton plays him with an easy, unbothered charm that never curdles into smugness, so when the industry's uglier instincts play out around him, Ken's steadiness reads as its own quiet rebuke.