Matthew Weiner on ‘Mad Men’s’ Season Finale, Don Draper’s Future and Bob Benson Conspiracy Theories (Q&A)
[Warning: Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the season six finale of Mad Men, which aired Sunday night on AMC.]
With Mad Men’s penultimate season now over, the show’s creator and showrunner, Matthew Weiner, talks with The Hollywood Reporter about its “hopeful” ending, his surprise at the conspiracy theories around Bob Benson and the random way Megan Draper ended up being linked to Sharon Tate — and what it doesn’t portend for the show’s final season (which he hasn’t yet written).
The Hollywood Reporter: Season six opened with Don reading Dante’s Inferno and then concludes with him standing in front of the hell he had grown up in. What was the arc of Don’s character in this season meant to be?
Matthew Weiner: I’ve reached the point where I realize I can’t control what the audience experiences even though, theoretically, that’s my job. People extrapolate, and I don’t have a problem with it either — it’s kind of an amazing experience as a writer to see what people bring to it — but what it was supposed to be was twofold: I really took my cue partially from the year, saying it’s 1968, and everything that we’ve introduced in the series so far in American culture, whether it was the word “Vietnam” in season two or you know, there’s a revolution going on in the world, not just in the United States.
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And I think there was some sensation that Don was going to be left behind, some guy in a suit, and be out-of-touch, and be like un-groovy or whatever, and that’s not really what it was about as far as I could tell. What it was about was an opportunity for change and then, you know, as you can see from the ending, a failure at least on the culture’s part to change … [with] Nixon back in the White House and every single student and other revolution violently clapped down on. So taking that — and it’s not a history lesson — but taking that and wondering where Don was after his sort of agreement to support his modern wife at the end of last season and kind of giving up on his fantasy of romance, here he is back doing what he has always done.
And that premiere episode to me could have happened right before the premiere of the entire show. You know he could have been with Midge and married to Betty and there it is and here he is doing it again.
So I felt this season was a descent into Don’s anxiety about why he was still the way he was, and I wanted to have a moment of realization of whether he can change or not. That he was going to have to, on some level, confront who he is and that that is the big tension in his life. People ask me if I’ve been saving stuff for the end of the show and, as you can see, no. You know what I mean? I’m not saving things for the end of the show; we really felt like that’s where it should go and so [you see] his impulsive behavior about not being able to deal with the Jaguar guy, firing their biggest client, forcing them into this merger and then attacking the guy that he merged with because he can’t have it on his own terms, becoming obsessed with this mistress who is trying to keep things lighter than they are. I always felt like it’s almost her rejection of him that makes him really fall in love with her and so he really has all of these issues and at the same time we’re going to find out more and more about who he is and it was all working up to what I came in with the beginning of the season with, which was a moment of Don telling the truth, first at work in the most inappropriate place, in the middle of a pitch, and then to his children, especially to Sally. Him getting caught by Megan was not really interesting to me and probably avoidable on some level, but him being seen by Sally, that was the worst possible thing that ever happened to him. So that was the thing I felt would drive him to really say this is who I am.
You know we did a lot during the season, you could see it now looking back on it, we did a lot about the children. Because that’s my feeling, Ted says it in the finale, when the world is like that you have to turn inwards, you have to turn towards the things you can control.
THR: Losing Sally, whatever tenuous relation that he has with her, losing it because of the discovery of his affair with Sylvia, I think it’s incredibly shocking and damaging to him.
Weiner: I think that was a big part of it. Yeah, you saw he was in a drinking spiral after it, and I think there’s a moment in the finale, the phone call with Betty and Betty tells him Sally is now using a fake name and drinking alcohol, and all the things — her flaws, her crimes sound a lot like something Don Draper might have done and Betty says, well she’s from a broken home. Betty blames it on herself and you see this moment of shame on Don’s face because he knows what it’s from, he knows that it’s more than that and you know, Sally doesn’t know who he is, but she really knows who he is because she saw that. He’s kept that secret from everybody, but that’s the idea, the shame of who he is and where he’s from is really part of the problem of why that man does what he does and I wonder on some level if the audience really wants to know why he does what he does.
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That was my big anxiety but I feel like 80 episodes into it, 78 episodes into it, not that that explains everything, but that childhood, when I started the show and was researching it and thinking about this character and the men who were like this and the men who were there, that childhood is something that they all have in common, that or it may not be as Dickensian as that but it’s pretty bad and in their biographies of the great men of the 20th century, they don’t talk about that these childhoods because it’s filled with rural poverty and broken families and runaway dads and child abuse and you know the sex trade, all of it.
THR: For you, does the season end on a hopeful note?
Weiner: I hope so. No, I don’t want it to be ambiguous. There are a couple of things said in that episode; first of all, I think he makes a sacrifice for Ted so he can move to California. I think that’s hopeful. Or I think…
THR: Except is Megan going but Don’s not?
Weiner: It looks like that. I think he’s in love with Megan. I think that that scene in the finale, which is really a re-proposal, when he says — and this is pretty significant language, it may pass by quickly, but it was meant as something significant – when he says it got out of control, he’s talking about his drinking, and then when he says “I got out of control,” that is a huge step for someone like him. So for me, when he says that, he’s sending Ted and I think he thinks he can manage it with his wife, but he knows it’s the right thing to do and it’s said a few times in the last few episodes about Ted being a good man, and what does that say about Don? There’s a lot in the season about doubling. About them being diametrically opposed, about them being somehow two sides of the same person, or twins in some way and it’s not like Ted is the most virtuous person that ever lived but we see immediately that when he gets back into bed with his wife, it’s not the scene we’ve seen with Don getting back into bed with his wife, where he’s just like, like he did in the premiere, where he just gets into bed and goes to sleep.
THR: I was sort of with Don in thinking Ted’s not that virtuous.
Weiner: You know, he is in advertising! I shouldn’t have brought up the conversation because I really don’t look at these things as virtue and not virtue. I try not to judge the characters. I look at it as identifiable and accurate human behavior, good or bad. Look at Pete’s journey this season. Trudy says to him, well, now you’re alone, you have all the stuff, you’re free of everyone, you have a fresh start, and we find out he’s going to California in that scene, that he’s going out there with Ted, and then he says, that’s not the way I wanted it and she quite sternly says, well now you know that. Talk about a journey, right?
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I do want it to feel hopeful because you know Peggy has no choices — that was her story. She was forced into a new agency, she was forced to buy an apartment she didn’t want, she was sort of forced into this relationship, not forced into a relationship with Ted but then has no choice in that relationship with Ted. I’m never saying that people do not bear responsibilities for their actions, but she in particular really had no choices this season and Pete you know, screwed the pooch and really, really messed up his life.
THR: He did, there is always that desperation to him…
Weiner: I know, but he was so on top of the world right before they merged and then just watched himself knock his way down to being in charge of new business, which is the worst job ever, apparently.
