Jon Hamm wears an Omega Seamaster

Near the end of Mad Men, the show strands Don Draper in a roadside motel with a telephone to his ear and a Penney's shopping bag on the floor. The tailored suits are gone. He sits on the bed in an off-the-rack plaid shirt, somewhere on the drive west he started after walking out of the agency, and the watch is on the wrist that holds the receiver, its dial turned in toward his palm. Jon Hamm plays Draper, the advertising man who is really Dick Whitman, a poor kid who took a dead officer's name in Korea and built a Madison Avenue career on top of it.

The watch is an Omega Seamaster De Ville, reference 166.020: a 34mm steel automatic with a black dial, a date window at three, and a black leather strap. It is not the Rolex Explorer that watch writers file under his name. The Explorer, steel and sporty on its Oyster bracelet, belonged to the earlier seasons, when Don still ran a creative department in a good suit. The Omega is the one that lasts to the finale, the plain dress watch he keeps on through the unraveling and the long drive.

That Omega was never the production's to keep. Mad Men leased its watches from vintage specialist Derek Dier, who chose them with property master Ellen Freund, so the watch doing the acting was a real 1960s Omega borrowed for the role. After the series ended in 2015, the screen-worn piece went to Christie's, which listed it by its movement number, 23,943,081, and sold it that December for $11,875.