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Here is audio and video of the Matthew Weiner talk at the New York Public Library.

Anyone who expected Matthew Weiner to clinically dissect the meaning of Sunday’s ambiguous finale of “Mad Men” probably wasn’t paying much attention to the show, which over seven seasons refrained from hard judgment of human behavior, favoring instead complicated texture.

But in an appearance at the New York Public Library on Wednesday, in what he has said would be his only discussion of the show after the finale, at least for the time being, Mr. Weiner contradicted those who saw cynicism in the series’s concluding moments, which cut from the show’s hero, Don Draper, meditating beatifically by the ocean, to the smiling, singing young people of Coca-Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” commercial.

“I think it’s the best ad ever made,” he said. “That ad is so much of its time, so beautiful — I don’t think it’s as villainous as the snark of today thinks it is.”

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In the roughly 90-minute talk with the writer A. M. Homes, Mr. Weiner discussed how the show’s final season completed the story’s survey of the 1960s, which found progressive ideals giving way to conservative values and the rise of Richard M. Nixon.

“This whole last season,” he said, “was the idea that the revolution failed in some way, and it’s time to deal with what you can control, which is yourself. This turning inward.”

On the show, this journey took Don Draper on the road that led eventually to an Esalen-like spiritual retreat in Northern California. Though some viewers might have been frustrated by Draper’s removal from the traditional Manhattan setting of the show, Mr. Weiner “liked the idea that he would come to this place and have it be about other people, and a moment of recognition.” (He noted that this aspect was tough on Jon Hamm, who had to leave his longtime co-stars weeks before the production was completed.)

The writers watched actual films from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., to help shape the finale, specifically a pivotal scene featuring an everyman crumbling under the weight of modern life, featuring the virtually unknown character actor Evan Arnold. For the role, Mr. Weiner told the casting directors that “it’s probably the most important role in the series,” he said. “I need somebody who’s anonymous and who can cry, and really do it ugly.”

Mr. Weiner said that the idea behind the scene, in which Draper tearfully hugged the man, was that “the audience would feel that he was embracing a part of himself, or them, and that they were heard.”

Others associated with “Mad Men” previously weighed in on the finale, most notably Mr. Hamm, who discussed the episode’s final moments in an interview with The Times. Viewers have since debated whether the show was suggesting that Don had simply found inner peace or had, in fact, conceived the ad itself. (The commercial was conceived by an actual McCann Erickson creative director named Bill Backer.)

“My take is that, the next day, he wakes up in this beautiful place, and has this serene moment of understanding, and realizes who he is,” Mr. Hamm said. “And who he is, is an advertising man.”

Mr. Weiner didn’t touch on how the Coke ad did or did not fit within the show’s narrative. But he defended the ad, with its notably multicultural cast, against those who would now dismiss it as “corny.”

“Five years before that, black people and white people couldn’t even be in an ad together,” he said.

Other highlights from the discussion:

* Christina Hendricks’s Joan was not originally supposed to be a single mother on the show until writers convinced Mr. Weiner that it was right for the character. (On the show, she planned to have an abortion but then changed her mind.) “I didn’t think Joan would end up as a single mom feminist looking for child care on her own,” Mr. Weiner said. “That was a shock to me, and I loved it.”

* Writers also had to persuade him to pair off the characters Peggy and Stan in the finale. “I didn’t know Peggy and Stan would end up together,” he said. “That had to be proved to me.”

* For the end of the series, Mr. Weiner had in mind major plot points, like the Coke ad and the terminal illness for Betty Draper, since the show was renewed at the end of Season 4. Of Betty’s tragic turn, he said: “We loved the idea of her realizing her purpose in life right as she ran out of time.”

* Lit notes: Mr. Weiner drew heavily from the journals of John Cheever as inspiration for the show. He had never actually read another book with a “Mad Men” connection, Frank O’Hara’s “Meditation in An Emergency,” which appeared prominently in Season 2, until it was incorporated into the story. But “it changed my life,” he said.

* Mr. Weiner joked that the costume designer Janie Bryant had been saving the Don-Draper-in-jeans moment until his transformative moment of empathy in the finale. “The guy is definitely out of uniform,” he said.