Matthew Weiner is not upset that Mad Men is coming to an end. He was a few months ago, when the final scripts were turned in, when he directed those last scenes with star Jon Hamm, and when he bid adieu to the actual show that consumed a fourth of his life. But no, he's not broken up about it and is thankful that, during our 20-minute talk in a windowless green room at Hearst Tower before his onstage interview hosted by Town & Country, I avoided the topic. Weiner gets questions about that a lot. His metaphorical reasoning: He just spent 14 years in the TV writing equivalent of higher education. Does anyone spend their summer bummed about graduation?

This is not the same as wanting to put Mad Men behind him. It's hard to imagine that as an option. There's too much research inside Weiner's mind, too many existential considerations about Don Draper's ultimate path, to ever fully flush the AMC series from his mind. The creator has an answer for every detail—and, with most of the show behind him, is happy to dive in. If he does find himself having to talk about Mad Men for the rest of his life, at least he concoted a show with a world dense, thoughtful, and resonating enough to return to endlessly. This is why Weiner can't wait for Season 7.5 to unravel—the seedling he conceived on the set of Becker will finally be Mad Men, the complete series.

They're not the same thing. A television show develops in stages. While Weiner had a grand plan, the hustle it took to pull it off warped Draper's story. The audience plays a part, too—when Mad Men hits airwaves, when viewers soak it up, when critical thoughts percolate onto the internet, what was conceived is crystalized as something entirely different. Getting Weiner in a room to talk the past, present, and future of the show, that nugget was the logical starting point: How did we end up with this Mad Men?

But before our conversation turned to his lauded series, the topic of drinking habits was already on the table…

Matthew Weiner: I did not realize until I was an adult, actually until Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face, that most men's social interactions are surrounded by drinking. That people who go fishing, that's the whole purpose.

You had a hunting accident on Mad Men. Is that a Dick Cheney reference?

Yeah, Ken Cosgrove. Well, when it happened, it was apparently very, very common. Most hunting accidents are not done the way that you see them in the movies where somebody is not wearing a vest and they're near a deer or something like that. They're usually right next to them and it's spray. But we really were trying to capture the spirit, if not the intention, of auto executives at that. I've talked to many people who serviced the auto industry at General Motors at that time and they were a notoriously hard-drinking, hard-living, fun-loving bunch.

Your research process for the pilot is well-documented. Did continued research play a role in expanding the series as it rolled along?

It's constant. We have someone who's in charge of a research department and the writers are also responsible. Honestly it's kind of a circle because we get a lot of ideas from research. And a lot of research has come to me in the sense that people want to tell me an anecdote. They usually form a pattern—I hear the same anecdote many, many times. Not always about the same person, but, for example, some man peeing his pants in the office, I've heard so many versions of it. The Joan story of her having to sleep with a client, I heard many versions of that.

Where did you hear those stories? Friends? Family?

No, no, no. These are strangers.

Where does Matthew Weiner meet strangers?

Despite the amount that I talk, I'm a pretty good listener and people tell me things. They have forever. It's been a lucky part of being a writer, believe me.

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What trend or event from the 1960s wasn't on your radar when Mad Men grew into a series?

There are lots of things I hadn't heard of, or things that you know but you don't know when they happened. Something as simple as finding out that "I Got You Babe" came out in 1965 when it's still part of the culture. That song is 45 years old. I don't think anybody would have guessed that. But more interesting is the recalibration of your understanding of things. When we got to the Cuban Missile Crisis, it became obvious to me that, if the assassination of JFK had not happened, this would have been the turning point in the twentieth century, certainly for the United States. The impact on civilians of having that week, plus after 10 years of nuclear fear, living through that was really, really a big event. And when I talk to people about their childhood or their adulthood during that period, they confirm that fact. All of our research is about what really happened. It's generals and Kennedy's options and his conversations with Khrushchev and what the Russians were up to. The public didn't know any of that. All the public knew is that the president got on and said "there are missiles pointed at us, we don't know what we're going to do."

And in seven plus days, actually, I think that the whole crisis is 14 days, and I think the public knew about ten of it. So we capture it in the show. For example, I kept hearing people talking about going to the windows to look out and see if there were planes coming, which is a story I'd heard also after Pearl Harbor from people who were that age, who were little boys and little girls living in fear. And with that goes a lot of behavior that became story in the show, which is "we might die, we might behave a little differently."

Death lurked around every corner in the 1960s. And it does on the show.

I think it's a big part of American culture. Certainly we're living in a post-9/11 environment. I think it's a comparable situation psychologically in the fact that life goes on, people were back in the malls a month later despite everybody's fear that Americans were going to just be inside.

The new season's opener touches on that fear.

I don't want to talk too much about the beginning of the show, but yes. That's something I had no idea about, that people were blowing up department stores. It was a big threat to advertising. We tried to show it in the show, but part of the '60s, starting with Ralph Nader or even before that, probably starting with Dwight Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech, was the anti-corporate mentality. Awareness translated, eventually, into a general anti-materialism. What we take for granted of young people wearing used clothing and things like that is a real threat to advertising. Of course, that generation turned out to be the greatest consumers ever, no worries there. But it was something they had to deal with.

You've been researching this era since your days on Becker around 2000….

I was thinking about it before Becker, but I actually got my butt in a chair and started working on it at night when I was on Becker. I hired my first writer's assistant. I had my first research done. I hired someone to go on Prodigy for me because I didn't understand it. I did… but I didn't. People don't realize, before Wikipedia in particular, almost all of the research sites that you wanted to get into cost money. Lexis-Nexis was $55 a month at a time when rent was $700 a month.

So you're not a technophobe. You don't believe that your new computer is emitting subliminal messages.

No, no, no, I love [technology]. I'm an early adopter, actually. I had a laptop pretty early on. I was on AOL early enough that I could have been "Matt." But I did not choose to be. I was like, "Oh, people can see you. I'm going to do this weird name that I had instead." And then it was stuck for a long time. I could have been "Matt25," I think.

How does the Don we saw last season, the man entering this final stretch, compare to the Don that you first pictured when envisioning the show's arc? Did it go according to plan?

One of the great tensions in the show is: Do people change or don't they? I've experienced almost ten years of having this job (forgetting about having written the pilot 14 years ago) and I'm like, I was 35 when I wrote the pilot and I'll be 49 when it goes off the air. Not that I'm Don, but, I have a different understanding of life, hopefully.

And you can't discount the contribution of Jon Hamm to who Don is. Despite this sort of nebulous character in your imagination—which for me was a cross between James Garner and William Holden, assuming qualities of an actor that are based on the roles that they played—he still has a light touch to him. I think his journey from an existentialist to someone who is really starting to value the things, the temporary nature of life, there's a bravery. I think Rachel Menken calls him on it in the pilot. There's a kind of courage to saying, "you live alone, you die alone, and there are no rules and whatever." That is a bit of a posture.

As much as I consider myself an existentialist, it's for young men. It really is. As you get a little bit older and, you know, you don't want to be the person clinging to life in terror so much so that you can't enjoy it. But I think that having children changed Don. His ruining the purity of his relationship with Sally, experiencing unconditional love and losing it, in a way. Things like that have changed him. I never anticipated any of these events happening. You take it a season at a time. I did not know we'd be doing 92 hours of it. And what I'd hoped for from the beginning was to tell a story about a regular person. I know his life is extremely extraordinary, but there's not a lot guns, there's not a lot of murder, there's no formula week to week. There's not a product that comes in that he has to sell. And to emulate reality as much as possible, in terms of who you are when you're alone versus how you're seen and how you reconcile those two things.

Was there a struggle with how little Mad Men had to be "about," plot-wise? Much of today's television focuses on extraordinary people.

TV and film, in general… some of it is designed for escape, designed to satisfy the lack of justice that we feel in everyday life. We find heroes and we get to have the wish fulfillment of, for example, a woman who has it all, who talks tough and tells people where to go and, yeah, they fail sometimes. There's not a lot of that on the show. I give the example of how we try to make it less abstract by making it more like real life: If a young man runs into a beautiful woman at a party on Mad Men and she gives him her phone number and he writes it on a piece of paper and then he loses his coat, he will, on a normal TV show, end up figuring out how to find her. On Mad Men, he will never see her again.

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Because Mad Men strives to be level-headed and honest, the audience seems keenly aware of its meticulous production design and camera direction. Every choice is noticeable, vibrant and therefore, interpretable to the imagination. Maybe this is a double-edged sword? Stanley Kubrick took the same approach and today we have Room 237, a documentary profiling people obsessed with The Shining's "hidden" secrets. One day, Mad Men will have a Room 237. In many ways, it feels designed to spawn fan theories. How did you reckon with that?



First, hearing the words "Stanley Kubrick" in reference to your work… there's no one who doesn't think that's a compliment. I think [this phenomenon happened] once [viewers] were alerted to the fact that we were creating what I thought was a safe environment for them to form opinions, i.e. it is one version of the truth, like everything is. But we were really trying to get it right. Especially because, unlike a lot of period pieces, a huge chunk of the audience is still alive and you are fighting with their memory, so you better try and get it right. I also felt like, wouldn't it be easier if someone asks me, "What's on his desk?" rather than me ask the designer, "What would be on his desk?" That seems to me almost easier if you can find it. And you know, Etsy, Ebay, things like this have really helped us with that.

Everything is done with intention. But some things are meaningful just to me. I think the thing that would be most surprising to people is how much the construct of the show as a period piece is a smoke screen for the writers—and I'm not just including myself—to put their own lives into their work. It's not done in the first person, but there are things that are so specific, they actually happened to somebody.

How much of writing Mad Men involved personifying the viewer to imagine how they would perceive these noticeably calculated choices? How did you ensure that the story you wanted to tell would survive the pop culture journey?

Once I got into a conversation with the audience through critics and through the audience itself, and I'm so happy to have an audience, about what we meant versus what they see, and to say so much of your experience of the show is unspoken and not in words, so it's no explained so you can't be sure, people started to think that everything was part of that message. And in honesty, when you are writing something and it's going well, if it's on your mind, it's going to be in the script. A lot of emotions and feelings come together.

In the third season [opener], Don says at the beginning, "I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been." And to me, that was my experience of having to write the show and trying to get fresh again. There's so much about running into places you've already been. By the time we get to season six and the premiere ends, we discover that he's cheating on Megan, and Don says to Sylvia, "I don't want to do this anymore," you start realizing that, well, that's the way life is. You're making the same mistakes again.

I can tell you right now that, we're usually finished with the show by the time the audience sees it, so something like Bob Benson… I did not know. I mean, I love James Wolk, we were super-excited about casting him, and we enjoyed writing the character, but I did not know that the audience would be winding up a story in their head that might not have been as good as what we were doing. To us he was a shadow Don to show that Pete had grown. When Don's doodling in season five, I think, which is where Lane kills himself, Don is doodling a noose in a meeting. I definitely picked that because I feel like we've all done something like that in a long meeting. I didn't know everyone would say "someone's going to die" and they were obsessed with Pete killing himself. We did have a suicide coming, but, like I said, it was on my mind.

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Everything in Mad Men is a Chekov's gun, whether it is or not. I just spoke to someone clinging to Peggy's baby that she gave up for adoption in season one. Was there any pressure to tie up "open-ended" story threads? And that's in quotes, because I had not considered it to be one.

I love the fact, when I discovered how this worked through the Catholic Church at that time… this was not a Philomena situation, at least in the United States. Giving up your baby meant that you were going to live in anonymity and the baby was going to live in anonymity. Talk about a story that people come up to me and tell me their version of, fans. Giving up a child is very common, especially before legal abortion, and it's something that is irreversible. And I love the stories that are irreversible in life. I love the mistakes that are irreversible. Life keeps going, but there's a scar. And even though Don gives her his philosophy of moving on, that hasn't worked out so well for him either. I think the audience saying, like, this is a TV show, yes, but it's playing against your concept of a TV show because that lack of resolution has formed that character. That was a resolution for her. We don't like it, but it was.

The end.

That was a happy ending for a woman—that child found a life—for a woman who's denied that pregnancy because it would have completely destroyed everything in her life. That said, you have to watch the last episodes.

When people talk to you about Mad Men, conversation almost always drifts to your time on The Sopranos. But, hell, I see Andy Richter Controls the Universe in the show. Mad Men is part sitcom.

First of all, let's not discount how funny The Sopranos was. David Chase is a really funny person and [so is Terrence] Winter. One of my sons is going through The Sopranos right now. We were just watching an episode the other night where Janice kills Richie, and Tony, they grind his body up and Tony takes her to the bus at the end and she goes, "What did you do with him?" And he goes, "We put him on a hill with pinecones and there's a view." And she goes, "Really?" And he goes, "What do you care what we did?!" We know that he's been ground up into sausage and, my son who's 14, gets this big belly laugh.

I've written a lot of quote-unquote sitcom scenes. I do not consider that to be a slight or anything. I love comedy and I think if this show was without humor, it would be unbearable. Life has funny moments and I enjoy situations of humiliation, which is also funny for the audience. Just from the first season, writing that scene with Pete returning the Chip n' Dip, that to me was right out of my eight-plus years in sitcom. "Here he is. He's in line. He has to do this humiliating thing. There's a bureaucracy to be dealt with." Honestly, the minute you're in a scene—again, going back to reality—you acknowledge the fact that most of the time our conversations we have no idea what the other person is talking about. That's just the way it is. Email has proven this.

So people talking at cross purposes, which is the lifeblood of a sitcom, becomes the lifeblood of life and a big part of the show. I always want it to be funny. I did not come up with this joke, but I have been complimented on it from a lot of comedy writers. It came out of the writers room. Lane going to kill himself in that Jaguar and it not starting—that is a big laugh. And it's not just the relief that the guy can't kill himself. In Waiting For Godot, which I was lucky enough to be in in college, there's the moment where one of the characters is going to hang himself and he takes his belt off to hang himself and his pants fall down. That to me is my sense of humor. That's the way life works. "The universe is indifferent," as Don has said.

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Does comedy allow you to stroll in and out of the surreal? In Mad Men, there's seemingly nowhere the mind, or reality, can't wander. Is there a point of reference for making that work?

No one can discount the influence of Twin Peaks, or David Lynch in general. But it goes back even further than that. Movies are a non-reality. Time is constantly being cut out of them. They're very akin to dreams in terms of their nonsensical nature and just the essential movement happening. That, right away, illuminates how surreal life experience is. I will go out on a limb here that, as someone who has never taken psychedelic drugs, but have lived a life where I frequently have trouble distinguishing between the real and the unreal— I have lucid dreams sometimes—using the control of cinema to show how our experience can be warped, you know, it's something as simple as the famous movie Rashomon. There's no fantasy in that. There are three people relating exactly what they think happened and it's not the same thing. David Chase did [the surreal] amazingly in The Sopranos. I got to be part of an episode ["The Test Dream"] with a 22-minute dream sequence in it. I think that considering that a third of our life, if you're lucky, is spent in bed and some of it dreaming, that's part of our everyday experience.

Mad Men is about life.

Mad Men's about life, but also every movie is immediately in the world of dreams.

The minute you turn that camera on and you're deciding when things start and stop, you are constructing a dream. I find all entertainment surreal.

In a recent oral history of the show, there was mention that the network wanted a Mad Men spinoff. Maybe a show focused on Peggy or Sally. Something. It didn't happen. As a Mad Men fan, I breathed a sigh of relief, but then I remembered how much I'm enjoying Better Call Saul.



I have seen the show and I enjoy the show. I will say, just to make a comparison to begin with, we have 92 hours of this thing. My premise has been far more deeply exhausted, number one. Number two is when that came up I avoided it. It was put on the table. It was not a suggestion. It was one of the conditions of me continuing to work there. At that point, I was not going to take any suggestions until I knew that I wasn't going to have the running time cut, I wasn't going to have to cut the cast, and I wasn't going to have to fill the show with product placement, which were the other conditions. So I didn't really consider it at that point. As we got deeper into the show… there's 50-something hours of Breaking Bad and there's 92 Mad Men. If we had done less, I might have been interested in it. But it's different strokes. I am glad that it's a piece of it's own thing. As far as I'm concerned, seasons five, six, and seven are the sequel to Mad Men.

Hard not to think of Don's quote again: "I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been."

Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's hard to not do it. It really is. I have the advantage that I've never taken for granted of being able to end this show how and when we wanted to. And that was a tough thing because we all really enjoyed it and we know what a special thing it was. [Anything more], to me, would have felt like being a seventh-year senior.

Matt Patches Senior Writer Patches is a Senior Writer at Esquire.com.

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