How 'Mad Men' Came To Be

March 14, 2015 9:28 AM

"Don Draper lived on hard drives for half a decade before anybody paid him any notice. In 1999, Matthew Weiner, then an unfulfilled writer on CBS' Ted Danson sitcom Becker, spent his every off-hour doing research on the 1960s: what people wore, how they decorated their offices, what they ate and drank -" The story of how Mad Men went from a risky pitch to an unknown network to one of the most popular and celebrated dramas of the decade. (Hollywood Reporter) Bonus: Ten Mad Men Characters we need to see again. (Vulture)
posted by The Whelk (39 comments total)

Metafilter: I just hoped I wasn't being hung like Jared the year before.

Seriously, though, this is awesome. I know we're not going to see Sal again, but I really, really want to.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:43 AM on March 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I miss Sal so very much.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:53 AM on March 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

The pictures that accompany this article are sensational. I mean, I suppose it's not that hard to take pictures in which amazing looking people look amazing, but these have a character and intensity about them that I really like.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:03 AM on March 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

I bought Season 5 recently so I could rewatch Peggy's resignation from Sterling Cooper as a model for my own "speech" a week or so ago. I couldn't bring myself to watch Lane go again, though.

It's been said and said again, but the show's handling of Lane's decline and death was so sensitive and well thought out. I believe it was Tom and Lorenzo where some people who'd suffered the loss of a loved one to suicide showed up in the comments and offered their kudos. More Jared Harris everywhere, please.

Also, I hold out hope for a Sal reappearance in the next few weeks.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 10:06 AM on March 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

IS THIS IT
ARE WE DOING THIS
I CANT HANDLE IT
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:16 AM on March 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Stern When we first started negotiating with AMC, one of the things they wanted was a spinoff. We talked about doing a contemporary one. Given the fact that [Mad Men] ends nearly 50 years ago, most of the characters would be dead. Sally was the one character young enough that you could see her 30 or 40 years later. There was a time we wanted a Peggy spin­off, too, and, a la Better Call Saul, a minor character going off to L.A. Matt wasn't comfortable committing to a spinoff.

FUCK U WEINER
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:40 AM on March 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

LAW AND ORDER FINANCIAL CRIMES STARRING AGENT SALLY DRAPER
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:41 AM on March 14, 2015 [18 favorites]

Draper Gene M.D.
posted by gubo at 10:46 AM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

SHE MARRIES GLEN AND BECOMES A MOB WIFE HE KILLS TONY SOPRANO
ALL THE PIECES FIT
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:48 AM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

SALLY-CON VALLEY
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:49 AM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm still stuck on the Don Draper = DB Cooper thing that someone (His Molluscness maybe?) posited around here.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:58 AM on March 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

i just started devouring this show on netflix.
*puts hand over ears, sings la la la la*
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 11:03 AM on March 14, 2015

Stern When we first started negotiating with AMC, one of the things they wanted was a spinoff. We talked about doing a contemporary one. Given the fact that [Mad Men] ends nearly 50 years ago, most of the characters would be dead. Sally was the one character young enough that you could see her 30 or 40 years later. There was a time we wanted a Peggy spin­off, too, and, a la Better Call Saul, a minor character going off to L.A. Matt wasn't comfortable committing to a spinoff.


Clearly the best option for a spinoff is one that allows for the name Better Phone Joan.
posted by palomar at 11:05 AM on March 14, 2015 [33 favorites]

Oh wow. I'd love to see what Grown-Up Sally does with her life.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:08 AM on March 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

We allready outlined this and it's called Sally Draper Demon Hunter

(I'd like to see Sally in the 80s working for a republican political campaign, but I'd really pefer Kirean play her so she'd have to like ...wait a few years til she aged into it and that's not gonna fly unless she plays like, Sally's daughter and Don's granddaughter or something.)
posted by The Whelk at 11:11 AM on March 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

(Besides we all know Mad Men is just a prequel to The Americans)
posted by The Whelk at 11:14 AM on March 14, 2015

Final episode: we start off with a flashback to New Year's Eve, 1959, to a party at the palatial Sterling estate. Don, apparently quite happy, steps away for a smoke, and an impeccably dressed old man offers him a light. It's Roger Sterling, senior, founder and first partner of the original Sterling Cooper agency.

Sterling tells Don about the AVATARS OF THE DECADES, mysterious figures throughout American history who drive and are driven by the times. "You've met one of us already," he says, and we get a brief glimpse of a hobo Don encountered when he was a child. "He was the Avatar of the Thirties - not a very constant one, mind you - just as I've been the Avatar of the Fifties."

He feels he's done well by the office - as an advertising man, he had one foot in the American psyche to begin with. Surely, he says, another ad man like Don would be the best person to continue the work. And so Sterling offers him the post of Avatar for the next decade. Don smiles and accepts a lit Lucky Strike from Sterling's hand, sealing the compact.

A decade later, Don prepares to choose a successor as he comes to terms with the consequences of a decade burned up in embodying the vices of an entire nation. "It's driven me mad, man," he exclaims, while begging a skeptical Peggy to take up the mantle of Avatar.

Harry Crane and Jim Cutler each make last minute plays to secure the power of the Avatar for themselves, but it's a humbled Pete who ends up making the contract with Don. As 1970 dawns, Pete slouches into a trench coat and leaves Manhattan forever; he'll imitate the hobo and wander the country, seeking to guide it from the road rather than the boardroom. CCR's "Run Through the Jungle" plays as he crosses the George Washington Bridge.

Don, free at last, decides to follow his dearest childhood dream: to open a dude ranch in Oklahoma. The last ten minutes of the finale are a baldfaced pilot for Buckaroo Don, a sitcom spinoff premiering in July.
posted by Iridic at 11:19 AM on March 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

Given the fact that [Mad Men] ends nearly 50 years ago, most of the characters would be dead. Sally was the one character young enough that you could see her 30 or 40 years later.

I have thought way too much about which of the characters are dead by now.

Don is definitely dead. I don't think Don made it to 1990. Cooper is obviously dead, and so is Roger Sterling. Betty, I think, might still be alive, still tormenting Sally and the staff at her assisted living place. Joan died fairly recently. I think most of the younger people are still alive. Peggy would be, what, a little younger than 75. I bet she's semi-retired, still going in to her office at the agency where she's a partner but spending a lot of time in her weekend place in the Hamptons. Ken Cosgrove has retired to a farmhouse in Vermont. Pete is dead. I think he may have had a cocaine-related heart attack sometime in the '80s. Megan might still be alive, but I can't really imagine how Megan is going to deal with aging.

So I guess I don't agree that most of the characters are dead, but this doesn't really sound like it has the makings for a good tv series.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:20 AM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Set the spinoff in the late 70s to early 80s, Bob has landed a job running the household for a scatter-brained governor. They could call it "Benson."
posted by drezdn at 11:28 AM on March 14, 2015 [21 favorites]

Damn, but I love a well-placed Benson reference.
posted by Dr. Zira at 11:37 AM on March 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

As much as I love Better Call Saul (which isn't better than Breaking Bad yet, but is better than the first season of Breaking Bad for sure), I'm glad Mad Men is really ending. For one thing, I feel like it's very much a show of the '00s; this decade's big shows seem to have more of a spring in their step, a flashier and more outlandish sensibility, and either less or more ironic distance from their subject matter (I'm not really clear which it is, but there's a definite difference). For another, it's hardly a sign of creative abundance to indefinitely reboot/refurbish/companion-series/sequelize/prequelize old shows rather than try something new. Also, though, I'm just really tired of what a perpetual bummer machine this show is.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:41 AM on March 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Never watched a minute of the show, or even any of the promos, but I too think those photographs with the article are nicely done. I also was struck by the sentence right at the beginning where the writer says, "I was advised not to send [my script] anywhere because... [p]eople would pay for the anticipation of what your project would be, and actually having one was going to hurt you."
posted by LeLiLo at 11:58 AM on March 14, 2015

The Draper Boys Mysteries, set in the late 1970's, features young amateur sleuths Bobby and Gene Draper, and is known both for Bobby's outrageous disguises and frequent guest appearances by a Shaun Cassidy lookalike who constantly gets his ass kicked by the Draper brothers.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:01 PM on March 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Sally Draper ditches her fiancee and moves to Minneapolis, where she becomes an associate producer of the TV news for WJM's rival station. The last shot in the opening credits is of her grabbing a knitted hat some small-town rube threw up in the air while pirouetting in the middle of a crowded street.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:04 PM on March 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

Pete Campbell is alive and well and Annie Edison's grandfather. You prove he isn't.
posted by dannyboybell at 12:38 PM on March 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

Man, John Slattery is a stone cold fox.
posted by Kitteh at 2:16 PM on March 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

I grew up in NYC in the 60s, in an environment very similar to the one in Mad Men. (My dad was pretty similar to Don; my mom was a lot like Megan and would have not have given the time of day to anyone like Betty). Although I am a few years younger than Sally, I totally had most of the outfits she's worn. I do love this show, but I have to keep reminding myself it's not my story, and I do not share Matt Weiner's world view at all. Some things ring so true that the things that don't are really jarring. Mostly I remember the grown-ups having a lot more fun and joy (despite the deeply felt angst over current events), and I kind of miss that in the show.
posted by maggiemaggie at 2:20 PM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Pete Campbell is alive and well and Annie Edison's grandfather. You prove he isn't.

Oh, I've always taken it as read that Pete and Trudy are Annie's grandparents. If, when the new version of Community comes out, we learn that Annie's mother is named Tammy, we'll have proof positive.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:43 PM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

AMC was not an unknown station, it was just a shitty one.
posted by NoMich at 5:39 PM on March 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don Draper lived on hard drives for half a decade

Didn't he get bits in his teeth?
posted by sylvanshine at 7:56 PM on March 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Don Draper lived on hard drives for half a decade

However, because of the simulation's settings, for Draper this decade subjectively seemed like well over ten thousand years.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:30 AM on March 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

I'm still annoyed that they didn't include the Stonewall Riots. That would have been a perfect time to catch up with Sal!
posted by Spiced Out Calvin Coolidge at 9:59 AM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don is definitely dead. I don't think Don made it to 1990.

So much cocaine in the 80s.
posted by Artw at 7:45 PM on March 15, 2015

Pete is dead. I think he may have had a cocaine-related heart attack sometime in the '80s.

Crap. Well, we can't do that twice, so Don eother gets AIDS or jumps out of a window during a financial crash.
posted by Artw at 7:52 PM on March 15, 2015

Don was killed in the Cola Wars.
posted by drezdn at 8:05 PM on March 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Which reminds me of my spinoff idea... Make a show set in the 80s called "Sterling, Cooper, and Partners" that tells the story of the agency in the Reagan Era. Everyone from Mad Men could be gone (except for a cameo to keep the suits happy) and think of all the crazy 80s stories they could tell. Especially since the 80s seems like one of the peaks of the advertising profession.
posted by drezdn at 8:08 PM on March 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

"why do we want to do a Superbowl ad for a fruit company?"
posted by Artw at 8:11 PM on March 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

CBS Sunday Morning segment: Bidding goodbye to "Mad Men"
posted by maggieb at 2:46 PM on March 22, 2015

COMPUTER WILL STILL BE HERE. COMPUTER WILL SERVE YOUR ADVERTISING NEEDS .

COMPUTER IS COMPUTATIONAL AND SUFFERS NO HUMAN FLAWS. COMPUTER IS WITHOUT EGO, ALCOHOLISM OR SEX ADDICTION.  

AWAITING INPUT...

AWAITING INPUT...

posted by Artw at 8:39 AM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]