On Tuesday, shortly after watching the
"Mad Men" season two finale, I spoke with the show's creator
Matthew Weiner about the episode, the season, the show's future, the 1960s, "The Sopranos," his mother... well, we talked about a lot of things. Really, Weiner talked about a lot of things, and I just did my best to keep up with transcribing what had been scheduled as a half-hour interview and wound up running for nearly 90 minutes.
Because I don't expect anyone but the most obsessive "Mad Men" obsessives to read the entire thing, I'm going to take a page from the way
Mo Ryan formats her Q&A's, with a some of the more notable quotes up top, followed by something resembling a full transcript (give or take a few tangents) after that. Enjoy.
THE HIGHLIGHTSOn how he feels about the season:
I'm thrilled with it. It was very hard and very scary, and I have a great writing staff, and I had an idea for what I wanted to do, and I feel like I pulled it off. I'm very, very proud of what we did. The strangest thing is, the last script was really written about eight weeks ago, and emotionally, it's exactly where we are right now ,and it's exactly what I wanted to write about for this season. And it seems to be quite related to the emotional mood of the country.
On the story arc for the Drapers this year:
Betty was a child last year, and this year she was an adolescent, and I wanted to show her growing.
(And) here's Don, he has survived this near death experience on some level (last year), and just say if he starts to lose this world that he's established, he's basically going to start wondering who he is. I wanted to show him running away and trying on new lives, and I wanted us to see Dick Whitman. I wanted us to see that person under all of it, and I wanted to earn that. That journey, I think, is part about the future, who will he become, and it's part about... to understand who is the man underneath all this stuff.
On what went on between Don and Betty in between season one and season two:
I believe what we should have gotten from the insinuations that we got is that Don probably called Dr. Wayne, found out that Betty knew, was remorseful about coming home at Thanksgiving, we saw him on the steps, and decided to be good. And I went out of my way to show this the first few episodes before he fell off the wagon, that he was bored on some level, but what it was really about was him being there and showing up on time. This was a guy who she never know if he was coming home or not. As he says in the first episode, "I was here." They never had a discussion about it, and she never forgave him, but whatever kind of blow out they had, he promised to change and behave better and be more attentive and show up on time and, in the language of today, be more involved.
On Betty's decision to have a fling in the finale:
This is a triple witching hour for a woman in that situation. She is pregnant, which is actually, believe it or not for a woman of that era, sexually liberating. There's no risk. She is drunk. She is angry, and it's the end of the world. There is a feeling of a lack of consequences, because the bombs are going to come in five minutes. But I think she has put herself on equal footing. To me, it was more about going back to episode one, this woman is in a very vulnerable place to begin with. She's been playing with fire. Where she is when she's back there, and that guy, the handsomest man on the planet just happened to walk in there -- there's not a woman in the world who wouldn't say, "Yeah, that guy would make me rethink my fidelity."
On Peggy's speech to Pete:
Sometimes, it's a sick feeling to look at who you are, and sometimes it's just something that disappears. That's part of what Peggy is talking about to Pete. She's not talking about the baby. I hope it's not taken literally that way. She's talking about moving on in your life. "I wanted other things," but when she starts talking about that part of her that's gone, there's no one who understands that more than Don.
On Peggy's decision to give up the baby, and the fact that we didn't find out what happened for sure until the finale:
People wanted to believe that was her baby. And, by the way, that woman does not want to be around babies. That's really it. She does not want to be around babies, does reminded about this. In episode five, Don gave her some advice that comes off as very friendly and very kind and very loving, but it's very bad advice.
On Peggy advancing at the expense of people like Freddie Rumsen:
I've always seen her rising, and I always saw that her rise would be, like a lot of great things that happened to us, at other people's expense, whether we intended it or not, there is a complication to it. It hurt a lot, and I knew that was good. When you write these stories, be it "The Carousel" last year, Don coming home, or that scene before Betty kicks him out and she's all scrubbed and asks, "Do you hate me?" or Freddie going to Don, "If I don't go into that office, who am I?" or Jimmy saying to Don, "You're garbage" -- these things cause me pain I'm writing them, and I hope if they're executed properly, that the audience will feel that.
On Pete's growth, and the praise Don gives him in the finale:
I think, honestly, that Don left (the convention) because he knew Pete would take care of it. I think Don was telling the truth. The reason Duck picked Pete is because Pete has changed. What Don said is true. You see Pete has gifts, and rather than just acting like he's in charge and he's top of the heap and deserves everything, he has behaved properly. His whole research that he did, you could see at the hotel that Pete had done the work.
On fans' dislike of Bobbie Barrett:
People were upset about Bobbie Barrett, that she wasn't Rachel Menken, and I'm like, she's not Rachel Menken, and he's not in love with her, and he says no. But he should never have slept with that woman. It was really just a medication. She offered him something he wasn't getting at home, but it was really just a medication.
On Don grabbing Bobbie below the waist and ordering her to do what he said:
To me, that is sexually violent in the sense that "9 1/2 Weeks" is sexually violent. A sadomasochistic relationship is about power as much as sex. Bobbie Barrett is playing in the same world as Don, and I think what she's saying to him is 'I slept with you, so you have to do what I say,' and what Don is saying is, 'No, I slept with you.' As uncomfortable as it may be for people, they go on to have a relationship, and it's based on their knowledge of their inner selves. To me, you can look at is as a perversion or as violence, but there are sexual relationships based on power, it was specific to them, and I think Bobbie Barrett was extremely aroused by what that experience, by Don being in charge.
I'm not trying to be incendiary about it, or insensitive. Certainly, my god, that is not behavior that should be emulated in any respect, it is a complete violation. But with these two people and their relationship and the history they had with each other, it was very natural and believable, and also kind of showed a ruthlessness on both their parts. She could have gone in and not done what Don said, too. I believe it was titillating for her. That's what I meant, that's that the actress was told, that's what I meant it to be.
On Joan being left behind professionally:
It's crushing, but all I think about is that scene when she tells Peggy she's getting married at Christmas, which is very painful, which shows she's still devoted to this fiancé despite him raping her, nine years, she's been there nine years and she's back on Don's desk and Peggy is getting her name on the door. That is a reality that she did not expect. Women like Peggy moving up is part of what made that happen. Some women got very entrenched, but Joan is a working woman, and she wasn't even considered for that standards and practices job. They didn't even think about it. It wasn't malicious; they just never thought about it. My advertising consultant said, "The biggest tragedy of this thing, besides that we love Joan and want her to be recognized, is that this is the first successful business relationship that we've seen at Sterling Cooper, and it's thrown away." They really worked well together.
On whether he'll be back next season and what stories he might have in mind:
First of all, let me say that I love the show and I love the characters and we just started. There's no crisis. I have every intention of being part of this show forever. I love doing it and I love the experience and I love working with everybody I work with. But I feel like I just ran a marathon and I need to have some Gatorade. Obviously, I know Don and I know where the pieces are, but -- it's a horrible thing to admit -- I will have to go from the high I have of just completing this to going, 'Oh my god I'm going to fail.' In terms of the content of what's there, I have a lot to lean on. I have my genre, I have the history, and I have the ages of these people. I know now that I can tell a completely new story than last year. The central conflict of this year was Don and Betty's marriage. Hopefully, if I can figure it out, there will be something new.
On whether he might do another 15-month jump that would take the characters past the JFK assassination:
I can say one thing in advance: the Kennedy assassination is very well-trod territory, and I just don't see myself adding new to that. But I might start the day before it. Or I might do what I did with a lot of historical events, which is to put it in the background and show people's personal events overtaking it.
On whether Duck drank immediately after he put his dog out in the street:
He doesn't. But, again, there's no reason to know that. It's like when we talked about everyone last year thinking Dick Whitman was Jewish. There are ambiguities of communication, and I don't judge people for misinterpreting. That's the whole show to me -- take what you want from it. None of it's wrong. That moment was like Sally watching Don shave. This is a judgment, this is a reminder of your shortcomings.
On people seeing thematic parallels between "Mad Men" and "The Sopranos":
I think I got a job on that show because I had the same things on my mind. David (Chase) read my pilot and saw that. I believe in a complete universe. Certainly, there are a lot of parallels. I can't respond to it without sounding defensive. I'm not. I'm doing my thing, and people want to make comparisons, I think it's flattering.
On whether January Jones dubbed any of Laura Ramsey's dialogue as Joy in "The Jet Set":
It's not. Scott Hornbacher said this immediately, he's from Minnesota. January's from South Dakota, Laura's from Wisconsin. I think that's part of it. Part of it also is I picked a woman who I found very attractive and they may have a lot of similarities. It was not deliberate.
I will say this: in the scene where Don thinks he's seeing Betty at the bar, a couple of those shots are of Betty. That's deliberate, and that was written into the script. And Phil Abraham just hit that one out of the park. I was very proud to be involved in that.
THE TRANSCRIPT (more or less)
Big picture, how satisfied are you with how the season came together?
I'm thrilled with it. It was very hard and very scary, and I have a great writing staff, and I had an idea for what I wanted to do, and I feel like I pulled it off. I'm very, very proud of what we did. The strangest thing is, the last script was really written about eight weeks ago, and emotionally, it's exactly where we are right now ,and it's exactly what I wanted to write about for this season. And it seems to be quite related to the emotional mood of the country.
What would you say that idea was? Was there a specific story you wanted to tell, or was it just several months in the lives of those characters?
Oh, no no no. I had a very specific story I was trying to tell. Hopefully, it's there in the story.
One of them was about -- the 1962 part was, what was on people's minds in 1962. This is the era that was, with hindsight, referred to as Camelot, so it wasn't a particularly eventful year, but it was a time when people's comfort had increased, and they were starting to investigate other things. 1961 was more eventful in terms of civil rights, but you could tell what was on people's minds because of the books that started coming out. "Silent Spring" comes out near the end of 1962, then you get "The Feminine Mystique" in 63, "The Affluent Society," "Unsafe at any Speed." These issues of the environment, women's rights and poverty, civil rights and what is the corporate agenda of America, and do we have to be beholden to that? These are all big parts of what became the political and social change of the 60s, and I really wanted to focus that and show that sense I felt was going on from reading the literature and newspapers and talking to people who were there that there was a sense of the end of the world as we know it, not just from a nuclear threat, but from all these things we'd gotten used to. That was true then, and it certainly cyclically feels like the environment we have now.
Aside from the 1962 story, were there certain stories you were trying to tell about the marriage, or Peggy, or...
I definitely wanted to talk about faith. And I'm always interested in commerce versus art. That was a big part of the story. Specifically, with each of the characters, they all had their own story.
Most notably, the story of the marriage was, Betty was a child last year, and this year she was an adolescent, and I wanted to show her growing. And also show Don -- the issue of identity, I'd already blown out this story -- I wanted to tell a new story. That's what was hard for people about episode one, there was such a tough agenda there, because it also had to be for people who had never seen the show before. But I think that when you see the finale, you will see that the entire story is laid out there, in episode one.
What it was about is, here's Don, he has survived this near death experience on some level -- which, of course I completely undercut and say it's never a near death experience, it's the American dream, you can always get by with whatever identity you have -- and just say if he starts to lose this world that he's established, he's basically going to start wondering who he is. I wanted to show him running away and trying on new lives, and I wanted us to see Dick Whitman. I wanted us to see that person under all of it, and I wanted to earn that. That journey, I think, is part about the future, who will he become, and it's part about -- not just for like some storytelling satisfaction to find out how he got there -- but to understand who is the man underneath all this stuff. He's not just a cipher; he's someone who has desires and weaknesses. It's part of why he's great at his job. The idea of him trying on these new lives, the fact that he fit in with those jet set people, that wasn't a dream.
People were upset about Bobbie Barrett, that she wasn't Rachel Menken, and I'm like, she's not Rachel Menken, and he's not in love with her, and he says no. But he should never have slept with that woman. It was really just a medication. She offered him something he wasn't getting at home, but it was really just a medication.
Getting back to Dick Whitman, one of the things that really struck me was seeing him with Anna, the only person in the world who really knows who he is and doesn't judge him for it, and he's comfortable. He's happy.
I had this image from the very beginning that he would be sitting in her apartment in California, and she would be in a pink bathrobe and he would be in a flannel shirt, and he would be Dick Whitman. Part of it's a story about class, but part of it's like, I don't know -- all the trappings you take.
So much of the season, and you've seen this shot repeated a lot, how you are received. The "Maidenform" episode was the climax of this theme: When you see someone, whether it's beauty or not, you have an impression of them, and then every piece of factual information you get about them diminishes them as they become more real. The great irony in that show is that, in the end, Don was the one with the reputation. Pete thinking the model is foreign, but she has a mother, everyone is a person. Getting underneath the haircut, and the suit -- Don's going to these foreign movies and talking to the hot rod guys, he is open to the culture. This is a part of this job, he is a curious person, and it's part of the secret of his creativity is that he's not judgmental, he's open.
That image of him sitting there, being Dick Whitman is, who is that person, what's underneath that? He's not just a cipher, he's not just the guy from the horror movie "The Stepfather" who looks in the mirror and wonders "Who am I?" The first car that I bought, I leased it, that I did not own, that did not smell like coffee from driving around as a PA, that I hadn't spilled 80 cups of coffee for all of my bosses cause I was a production assistant and a runner, I got in that car and went, "Who am I now?" If you're lucky and you have roots, you can embrace that. And for a lot of us, it's like "I'm never going back there." Talk to any movie star; they're fighting to be themselves, but at the same time they wanted an extraordinary life. It's like going away to college, and nobody knows you were the one who threw up in the bus in seventh grade. You're not called "Vomity" anymore. That’s not me, but I do remember getting to college and meeting this woman who was so bohemian, and had such a screw you attitude about the world and didn't shave her legs and swore all the time, and she was so crude, and she had a friend visit from high school, and she was the valedictorian, do-gooder, ran every club. The overachieving high school student, and here she was as a chain smoking bohemian in college. It's the transformation of people.
Sometimes, it's a sick feeling to look at who you are, and sometimes it's just something that disappears. That's part of what Peggy is talking about to Pete. She's not talking about the baby. I hope it's not taken literally that way. She's talking about moving on in your life. "I wanted other things," but when she starts talking about that part of her that's gone, there's no one who understands that more than Don.
If we see how Don can be when he's being Dick Whitman, and how much the Don Draper façade is costing him in his marriage, now that he's back with Betty, can he tell her this. Can they be happy going forward?
She still doesn't know anything, and there's no reason for him to tell her. The Don Draper image is costing him, but it's not costing him. It is who he is. That's what Anna is saying to him. You are who you are, and nobody knows you any other way. Stop trying to reconcile these things and just know you're a human being. But I went out of my way to show that the reconciliation of who he is, because the kids are starting to ask questions. You have this moment in episode 4 where he's telling Bobby something that Betty doesn't know. And Sally, in 'The Gold Violin,' he's starting to talk about the outhouse and the rope, his life is starting to come out to Betty because he doesn't want to lie to the kids. He is different from some of our dads because he is more forthcoming. But I think that's still one of the great tensions in the show, that she doesn't know who she is. There is no reason for him to tell her. Do you think there is?
Well, just looking at how he is with Anna, I thought about how he might be able to be with Betty if he didn’t have to conceal all of that.
How about the level that (Don and Betty’s) intimacy increased when their relationship is at stake? They had more honest conversations, and more deep conversations (this year). They don't know each other. That's a big part about people getting married at that time in history and all before it. Let's think about the men of that generation. I know you think he seems happier, because you're seeing a different person. You saw a happiness in the (Christmas) flashback, when he talked about Betty, but that's a man with his whole life ahead of him. You think about that kid digging holes, and now he's got a job, got a model, they have this agreement that's mercenary on paper but obviously comes from what she said: 'We're making both of our lives better.' I don't think he is happier, he's got a chance to say -- when he says he screwed everything up, he can't get into his own life, what man doesn't feel like that? He wants to be in it. Is it the secrecy that's keeping him from getting in it, is it the damage he suffered as a child? This is what there is more for the show.
He's 36 this year, and we know that, and he will be older next season -- even if the next season starts the next day after this, he will be older. I always intended on this show being as much about history as it is about the human history, the stages in your life. It's an unusual thing for a TV show to specify the ages of its characters, and I told you how old everybody is, because that's part of the story to me. Betty turned 30, it's not said or anything there from the show, but she turned 30, she was 28 last season, so that is part of what happened.
And obviously, Joan turns 31, and I have to assume that played a role in her finally deciding to settle down.
I think so. But also, she just found -- if you are buying into the idea, as she told Peggy in the pilot, that you want to find a man and live in the country, it's an easy thing to say, but then you find the perfect man, and her fiancé is as perfect on paper as Don is. But she's definitely motivated by age. She's old for that era to be unmarried. Part of it makes her strong and exciting. I don't think she's desperate, but one of the great things about her this season is that she had opportunities opened up to her that she didn't expect, and things that were offered to her that she turned out to want that she didn't even know that she wanted.
I'm so proud of the way it is in episode 12, it's crushing, but all I think about in that scene when she tells Peggy she's getting married at Christmas, which is very painful, which shows she's still devoted to this fiancé despite him raping her, nine years, she's been there nine years and she's back on Don's desk and Peggy is getting her name on the door. That is a reality that she did not expect. Women like Peggy moving up is part of what made that happen. Some women got very entrenched, but Joan is a working woman, and she wasn't even considered for that (television department) job. They didn't even think about it. It wasn't malicious; they just never thought about it. My advertising consultant said, "The biggest tragedy of this thing, besides that we love Joan and want her to be recognized, is that this is the first successful business relationship that we've seen at Sterling Cooper, and it's thrown away." They really worked well together.
Joan had a tough time this year.
She did, but she had a tough time last year too. We were talking about this in the writers room, number one was, there was a dishonesty to ignoring this event in women's relationships at the time. You can read this book, "The Girls in the Office," it's just so common to have quote "a bad date," it was really part of the culture. The fact that it was Joan, I do feel that she was being punished for being sexually experienced, for having an appetite like a man. She threatened this guy by being more experienced than him, and he reacted out of his own insecurity because he wants a woman like that, but in the end, his ego can't handle her knowing things he doesn't. "Where'd you pick that up?" In the end, it's as ugly as Don (with Betty) and the yellow bikini.
I want to go from talking about Joan to talking about the other somewhat sexually violent moment of the season, which was Don grabbing Bobbie Barrett by the reins.
I don't see that as sexually violent.
I didn't necessarily either, but some people interpreted it that way.
I know, it's fantastic, but I'd love to talk about it, because I really sort of didn't. To me, that is sexually violent in the sense that "9 1/2 Weeks" is sexually violent. A sadomasochistic relationship is about power as much as sex. Bobbie Barrett is playing in the same world as Don, and I think what she's saying to him is 'I slept with you, so you have to do what I say,' and what Don is saying is, 'No, I slept with you.' As uncomfortable as it may be for people, they go on to have a relationship, and it's based on their knowledge of their inner selves. To me, you can look at is as a perversion or as violence, but there are sexual relationships based on power, it was specific to them, and I think Bobbie Barrett was extremely aroused by what that experience, by Don being in charge.
Even though Don was getting what he wanted, in a cold way, it's literally two people -- she was the aggressor in the car, and then he calls her on the phone with his kids there and lays down the law, but she drops this bomb and says "I liked being bad and going home and being good." You see Don being rolled into this thing. You don't know how much they're both using it for business to get what they want, but I saw it as, here's what always happens, and you can't have it both ways.
I always take it from character. I'm not speaking from a philosophical sense about these characters. They're not symbols. The more you know about Bobbie Barrett, and the more you know about Don, it probably should have happened in the bedroom, it was in public, but that's the currency of their relationship. Yeah, there's violence to it, as there is to him tying her up, and to him telling her to stop talking, and to them treating each other like s--t, and bossing each other around and having sex in the car. It's a side of Don that is part of what people find attractive about him. I think that, as there is with a lot of sexual situations, there's an incredible huge flag of judgment that comes up on the surface with people, and then there's this bubbling thing in the background that is, "Why can't I stop thinking about that?" And it's about the bedroom. You try to think just as animals, it's two people working it out that way.
I'm not trying to be incendiary about it, or insensitive. Certainly, my god, that is not behavior that should be emulated in any respect, it is a complete violation. But with these two people and their relationship and the history they had with each other, it was very natural and believable, and also kind of showed a ruthlessness on both their parts. She could have gone in and not done what Don said, too. I believe it was titillating for her. That's what I meant, that's that the actress was told, that's what I meant it to be.
We don't find out everything that happened during the 15 month gap about the marriage. Was Don faithful to her? Was Bobbie the first woman he slept with?
I believe what we should have gotten from the insinuations that we got is that Don probably called Dr. Wayne, found out that Betty knew, was remorseful about coming home at Thanksgiving, we saw him on the steps, and decided to be good. And I went out of my way to show this the first few episodes before he fell off the wagon, that he was bored on some level, but what it was really about was him being there and showing up on time. This was a guy who she never know if he was coming home or not. As he says in the first episode, "I was here." They never had a discussion about it, and she never forgave him, but whatever kind of blow out they had, he promised to change and behave better and be more attentive and show up on time and, in the language of today, be more involved. Be more reliable. Have expectations about him coming home for dinner and so forth, which were not there last season. And he got himself in a situation which he shouldn't have, he did not resist. He was impotent. That's really a lot of it. I don't think it was just hearing the news at your physical that you have high blood pressure and are getting old can make you impotent.
I wanted to talk about married sex, we did that in that Valentine's thing with Betty coming out of the bathroom, and him walking by and going "Wow" and going in to pee, and her going to make the bed. This is not the movies, you don't just couple. She has to go in and make the bed in her outfit. As much as we'd like to see them come crashing in the hotel doors and bang against the walls and rip each other's clothes off, this is the reality of the domestic life he's in. She lies to Francine about it.
People lied this year about a lot of things.
I think they did last year, I don't think people were attuned to it. There were a lot of comments last year, "Why did she say that? We saw that she did something else." It's because she was lying! Now that people know that's part of what I find to be the reality and the privacy of the show, that during some of the silent moments of the show there's actually stuff going on, it's not just a soap opera push-in to let someone know what's going on. I felt like the status quo, it's about 1962, not just about Don. Everything's great, who could not be happy about with this, as Don said last year.
And Roger's another piece of that. We know he's obsessed with youth, he's been looking, and his id has been satisfied. Roger's in love. Completely in character. If I had really been accurate to the period, he would already be on his third wife.
I know there's a lot of negotiating to go, but if you do come back, do you have any idea of where you want to pick up next year?
First of all, let me say that I love the show and I love the characters and we just started. There's no crisis. I have every intention of being part of this show forever. I love doing it and I love the experience and I love working with everybody I work with. But I feel like I just ran a marathon and I need to have some Gatorade. Obviously, I know Don and I know where the pieces are, but -- it's a horrible thing to admit -- I will have to go from the high I have of just completing this to going, 'Oh my god I'm going to fail.' In terms of the content of what's there, I have a lot to lean on. I have my genre, I have the history, and I have the ages of these people. I know now that I can tell a completely new story than last year. The central conflict of this year was Don and Betty's marriage. Hopefully, if I can figure it out, there will be something new.
People hoped that this season would be about Pete telling Roger about Dick Whitman to get Don in trouble, or Don murdering someone to cover up his past. But I told that story, I blew it out. I will never abandon that as a character motivation for Don, but it's time for something else. Don doesn't murder people, and he's at a real place in his life -- what crisis does he have?
It's going to be compounded by the fact that his wife, not politically but personally, had a consciousness raising experience. Her tolerance, as many people have, for his philandering, was already being tested, that was really being tested by Jimmy Barrett. That is why when she sees that commercial, she kicks him out. It's all about the public humiliation. Second to him being in love with another woman, the fact that everybody knew about this but her. It's just like the fact that Don was so mortified in the other episode to find out that he had a reputation, that was horrifying to him, to hear from Bobbie Barrett that people were talking about him. That is not what Don wants to be, and it's not what Betty wants, either. The public humiliation of this affair, even if it was just Jimmy Barrett, having her kids watch that guy was too much.
And then Betty started to grow up in "The Inheritance." I always saw that as like a 48 minute version of Don's pallbearer speech from last season, where he talked about how you move up a notch. Betty was seeing that, okay, Don's not taking care of her right now, and who knows if that's over. She goes home and her father's not there for her, and her nanny's not there for her. And she comes back to this house and she's kind of adrift, and then there's Glen, who has run away, just like Don does in the end, who gives her everything she needs, who admires and loves her, and at some point she looks at him and at a certain point, she looked at him and realized, 'I'm a mom, I'm an adult' And she turns him in even at the realization that he'll hate her. As Helen says to her, "The hardest part is realizing you're in charge." Meanwhile, Don is running away.
I want to talk about Peggy. In episode two, we see the baby, we assume it's Peggy's baby, then in episode five we see that Anita was pregnant, and we don't find out until the last episode what exactly happened.
It's storytelling. You don't want to start the story on page 30, you want to start it on page one. I felt that people's interest in what happened to that baby, I enjoyed it, but I also thought that as the season went on, you realized that that wasn't the issue. The issue was how was Peggy dealing with that no matter what, that she had given this child up. I wanted to talk about faith, and I wanted people to feel about her the way they feel about Don, which is this ambiguity, "Do I judge her? Do I hate her about this? Do I love her for being so emotionally honest?" I felt that it was a way for me to defuse the kind of soap opera -- and when I say soap opera, I know a lot of the show is a soap opera, I'm not judging it. Let's call it melodrama, not "melodramatic," but as a form of human drama -- I thought, "Let's just take this out of the story."
You were mistaken. People wanted to believe that was her baby. And, by the way, that woman does not want to be around babies. That's really it. She does not want to be around babies, does reminded about this. In episode five, Don gave her some advice that comes off as very friendly and very kind and very loving, but it's very bad advice. It's bad advice but talk to anyone who has survived anything, they will tell you, now in the era of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (that repressing bad memories doesn't help).
You stop worrying about Peggy as a person and you start seeing that it's a secret she's living with, and she was really young. If nothing else, you start to realize that having that baby would have ruined her life. And that is so common and so part of our culture, and we're judgmental about it, it's just the way it is. Women leave their families, men leave their families. When I started talking to the priests about what I was doing, they were saying this is a 3 or 4000 year old problem socially that we figured out how to deal with. Just from the Catholic point of view, I've had wonderful consultation from amazing clergy, most notably Jim Van Dyke in New York City. Part of his job is shepherding older priests who are retired, and he would ask them for all the details, he's the one who gave me the great detail of Father Gill doing the modern Grace, and Peggy's mom going "Now, are you gonna say Grace?" Everyone Catholic has said that was right on the money. My own fascination with it was, okay, Peggy has committed a sin that is like murder, and maybe worse for a young girl, probably the worst sin a young girl could make. She's been raised thinking that, and where is that going to go? I wanted her to have to deal with it, but I also wanted it, from the very beginning, I wanted it to come out -- look, it was all about telling Pete. That was all about revealing that secret and not playing that irony any more. I built it into every episode this season, I knew from the beginning, to earn that. I knew that Pete would fall more and more in love with her, and they would become more and more of a real relationship. When his father died, he looked around the office and looked at her -- they slept together. They slept together. They had a relationship. I think, in the end, the baby, all of it, was just a way for us to see, what I'm showing with everybody: that Peggy is a complicated person who has made a lot of private choices, and she can either be like Don -- she's going to pay a price somewhere, and not in a judgmental way.
I thought it was interesting, the last time we see Don give a pitch is to the Heineken people, and the later episodes we see Peggy asserting herself, and the Popsicle pitch is very much the sort of thing we would have seen Don do last year.
It's Peggy's version. Let's see Peggy do it. We cut out of the Samsonite thing, and we know she's good. I always tell people, you want to take care of your audience. Part of it is people like seeing things, and say they want to see them again and again, but they don't really. You want to save it for when it matters. I wouldn't say that's her Carousel speech or anything, but at least you're getting a sense (that she knows what she's doing). You were convinced. To me, her best pitch was in A Night to Remember, at the church, when she's playing Don, and Father Gill is Duck, and the church people are the clients. All the people in advertising contacted me and said, "I can't believe you did that. That was one of the funniest things I've ever seen." Because that's the way it is when you do stuff for free.
Especially since you saw Peggy in the casting session last year, I wanted to show that Peggy had come into her own, that she has Don's talent for turning life and not research into a good campaign. It wasn't Don, it was her. I liked that about it. When you see movies about stand-up comedy or painting and you're asking the audience to believe that someone's good at something, well, are the jokes really funny, or is it just that the audience reacts to it and they like it? I wanted the audience to see that it was an ingenious pitch and believe on no uncertain level that Peggy was good at her job.
Here was my other story, which is very much a part of the season, which is about the youth culture. The Martinson coffee was that, too. Don is taking a back seat to that, because Don is taking advantage of a commercial opportunity, which is that clients want this young energy. He's not just jumping on a bandwagon, he's rewarding what needs to be rewarded. That's what a lot of episode one was about, and you feel it through the whole season, there's this crudeness to the world. Peggy has a young energy but she's a professional. That was part of it too.
I assumed Don cutting out of the aerospace convention would blow up in his face, but it actually saves him, because it places him in a position where he has to suck up to Pete, which in turn leads Pete to tip him off about Duck.
You think he was sucking up to Pete?
I think he was being sincere, but he was still placed in a situation where he had to say the things that Pete has always dreamed of hearing.
I think, honestly, that Don left because he knew Pete would take care of it. I think Don was telling the truth. The reason Duck picked Pete is because Pete has changed. What Don said is true. You see Pete has gifts, and rather than just acting like he's in charge and he's top of the heap and deserves everything, he has behaved properly. His whole research that he did, you could see at the hotel that Pete had done the work.
A creative director, Hal Riney in San Francisco, who was sort of the last of these guys, he died this year, he would disappear for months with his wife who was a casting director, and would come back with the Bartles & Jaymes people, would find weird casting, sample the culture. That's the story, anyway. And it's completely believable that Don could disappear for three weeks or four months. My intention was, and I know it's one of those things that's a surprise to the audience because they don't get to see every piece of information, what is Pete going to tell on him? He knew Pete wouldn't tell on him, I think he knew Pete had his back, and I do think that he thought Pete was ready. I do believe it. Don's a good judge of those things. As soon as Pete's not interested in destroying Don, (Don's okay with him). I go back to what Cooper said to him last year in episode 12: "One never knows how loyalty is born." You saw what happened when Duck gave Pete the job he's wanted since we've known him. He was like, "Really?"
It was like Peggy getting getting her promotion at Freddie's expense. "I wanted this but this is now how I saw it happening." There's so much of that in the show.
When you introduced Freddie and had him as the one who plucked Peggy from obscurity, did you know she would replace him one day?
I don't think I knew that, but I knew that she would eclipse him, absolutely. Freddie is one of the truest characters that there's been on this show. Every piece of research, every stranger who's come up to me, even when I was doing research writing the pilot, I read about guys like Freddie. A lot of people come up to me, say their dad was in advertising, and it sounds like a Freddie -- this guy who's affable, hard-core, this is man we would say has a substance abuse problem. The irony of Roger looking at him and going, "There's a limit, Freddie." I did know that she would eclipse him, but I also loved the idea that Freddie was about quality. Freddie has a daughter, and his sexism -- "It's like watching a dog playing a piano" -- he still took the best idea and he championed her. It just made it so much better.
I've always seen her rising, and I always saw that her rise would be, like a lot of great things that happened to us, at other people's expense, whether we intended it or not, there is a complication to it. It hurt a lot, and I knew that was good. When you write these stories, be it "The Carousel" last year, Don coming home, or that scene before Betty kicks him out and she's all scrubbed and asks, "Do you hate me?" or Freddie going to Don, "If I don't go into that office, who am I?" or Jimmy saying to Don, "You're garbage" -- these things cause me pain I'm writing them, and I hope if they're executed properly, that the audience will feel that.
Another moment that I found very painful at the time, though I may have misinterpreted it somewhat, was Duck putting Chauncey out into the street. Does he go up and have a drink after that? I assumed that he did at first.
He doesn't. But, again, there's no reason to know that. It's like when we talked about everyone last year thinking Dick Whitman was Jewish. There are ambiguities of communication, and I don't judge people for misinterpreting. That's the whole show to me -- take what you want from it. None of it's wrong. That moment was like Sally watching Don shave. This is a judgment, this is a reminder of your shortcomings. That whole episode is about how we're seen by other people -- or dogs in this case -- and he had to get Chauncey out of his life. That's what that was about. I don't think he went up and had a drink, and even if he did, he only slipped up. I don't think you're supposed to think he's back off the wagon until you see him with St. John and he says, "Here's to old friends."
The look on Mark Moses' face certainly looked like that was the first time in a long time.
How about that? How about that for a season? We hired him, and he was brought to me because we knew he was a good actor, and I definitely feel like the writing gave him an opportunity to do this, but my god, talk about coming through. What a season, what a performance. I don't know that people knew he was this good. It makes me happy to see him firing on all these cylinders. Standing out in scenes with Jon and Slattery and Joan, it's tremendous to me. It's very gratifying.
I want to get back to what you said a second ago, about how there are ambiguities, and you don't mind how people interpret things. There's the moment in "The Gold Violin" where Ken is looking at the painting saying that you're not supposed to analyze it, you're supposed to fall into it, and I'm thinking, "Um, I write these 2000-word dissertations on every episode. Maybe I should stop?"
I love that. Look, the show cries out to be analyzed. I leave so many gaps in communication. But there's something, and I credit David Chase for this in my schooling -- and I've always been this way, he taught me to be less oblique, because it could be much worse, much less effort to communicate, or the illusion that you're communicating and you're not. But what really I meant by that was, here's your chance to s--t on modern art, and what is a Rothko, and the traditional thinking is "A monkey can do that," and you're talking about educated people here, and Rothko is an exciting thing, if you're in the presence of the real painting, you don't say "I wonder why people want to own that." It's not something your kids can do. It's not something that's sofa-sized.
I felt that Ken, as always, has a deep sort of, even though it's blithe and accidental in some ways, he has an understanding that abstraction is a style that goes in and out. There are times in society when they want everything laid out, want it put into words and want it in the formula and want to know exactly what it is. And there are times when you just want to experience it. With David, we talked about so many things on that show, and it's just what happens, and I don't know what it means, and I can't put it into words, but hopefully through the magic of film, people will get it. It's X and Y at the same time. Bobbie Barrett, people will understand that it's violent and predatory and also an incredible turn on. You say that in words, and it sounds horrifying. But be in the experience of life. Don pushing Betty; it's an animal reaction, and it's very unpleasant, and it makes us hate Don, but who hasn't been there? I'm sorry. You may not have done it, but you're a liar if you say, male or female, that that is not in you. That's why we have the 10 Commandments. Those are our 10 biggest problems.
Since you brought up David Chase, I should mention that there have been a lot of times this season where people have looked at an episode and immediately attempted to draw a parallel between something you did and a "Sopranos" storyline. Duck as the new Richie Aprile, or Bobbie as Gloria Trillo, or whatever.
There are only so many tools in the box. Let me just say, without any defensiveness at all, any comparisons to the Sopranos are flattering to me. Fantastic. But that's not what I'm doing. I'm literally using the tools in my box, which is to ask, "What is the conflict in his world?" I know "The Sopranos," I was a huge fan of the show before I was a part of it... but I am not intentionally going for those things. That episode with Bobbie Barrett, oh, it's Tony in the sense that Don is using his power outside the bounds of proper society, the fact that he's in a car accident with his mistress is seen as an allusion to "Irregular Around the Margins"? Was that a story about Adriana and another woman locked up in a hotel room together? I feel like some of these things are in the consciousness, none of it's done from any sense of dishonesty if they overlap. But any comparison between my show and "The Sopranos" I just take as a compliment. I think everybody should be trying to imitate "The Sopranos."
I think I got a job on that show because I had the same things on my mind. David read my pilot and saw that. I believe in a complete universe. Certainly, there are a lot of parallels. I can't respond to it without sounding defensive. I'm not. I'm doing my thing, and people want to make comparisons, I think it's flattering.
In "The Jet Set," there are several scenes where I swear to god it was January Jones' voice coming out of Laura Ramsey's mouth as Joy.
It's not. Scott Hornbacher said this immediately, he's from Minnesota. January's from South Dakota, Laura's from Wisconsin. I think that's part of it. Part of it also is I picked a woman who I found very attractive and they may have a lot of similarities. It was not deliberate. But someone commented at the table read, they were sitting a couple of people apart from each other. January came to the table read even though she didn't have any lines in the episode but everyone wanted to come read it. When Laura started talking, she looked over at her, and a lot of people felt that way. I was not aware of it. I will not deny that there's some similarity, but I was not aware of it. I think it's cool.
The common denominator maybe is my idea of what woman Don goes with. When we were casting Melinda McGraw for Bobbie, I told the casting directors I wanted Suzanne Pleshette, and I got her -- in spades. Rachel Menken, these are all individuals, but they're all types. When I watched "The Jet Set," what I was struck by was how young Laura comes off. There's almost something perverse about it. I don't know that January has that.
I will say this: in the scene where Don thinks he's seeing Betty at the bar, a couple of those shots are of Betty. That's deliberate, and that was written into the script. And Phil Abraham just hit that one out of the park. I was very proud to be involved in that.
That and "The Inheritance" felt like real stylistic departures from what you'd done before.
I try and do a different show every week. "Three Sundays," episode four, has its own structure, episode five was a thriller, I'd never written one of those, episode six to me is this profound rumination on how we're perceived. Women with children are non-sexual, this idea of people's appearance, these women keep walking up to Don in slow motion, you have this fantasy -- first it's Betty, but you have a fantasy and it just erodes. We did it with every single woman. Even Peggy transforming at the end to go down to the strip club and sitting on the guy's lap -- come on, it was horrible. I try to do a different show every week.
We built up to "The Jet Set," for sure. I made it grayer and darker in New York, part of the point of the 60s is the focus is going to change from New York, and by 1972, New York is going to be a disaster. At this point, it's on its way down and California is on its way up. That hot rod, read Tom Wolfe. It's "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." That culture is the future, and Don is right there with his eyes open, absorbing it.
That brings me back to the question of the future storylines of the show. You haven't put a lot of thought into it yet, you're still coming down off the high of writing this season. But if you jump ahead another 15 months like you did between season one and two, then you'd jump right past the JFK assassination and land in 1964.
Did I say that?
No, but people are extrapolating based on what you did this time.
I think it's the way to go. I don't know yet, and I don't want to be locked in. I'm not trying to zig-zag around the audience, but I am literally sitting on the bench drinking some Gatorade right now. I just ran a marathon. I did some vomiting last week after mixing the last thing, Now I'm cooling down and I'm sore. Just to enjoy some of the accolades and the audience. When I'm working, I don't get to appreciate that stuff because I have that stuff on my mind. I'm trying to get it off my mind. Remember Don's advice to Peggy.
I'm just going to leave it at that. I can say one thing in advance: the Kennedy assassination is very well-trod territory, and I just don't see myself adding new to that. But I might start the day before it. Or I might do what I did with a lot of historical events, which is to put it in the background and show people's personal events overtaking it. That's one of the things I love about the finale. Here's the Cuban Missile Crisis, which other than the assassination was the defining moment of the '60s. It really changed people's lives. There is not one account, not one news report that says it was anything but completely catastrophic to people's personal lives and their perception of the world. I tried to get that feeling in there, but to show that, like any crisis, it's an excuse to tell the truth. There's a regime change.
The way history figures in, I was looking at the website when they started the season, there was a timeline on our website with Marilyn Monroe's death, James Meredith, Cuban Missile crisis, and I said, "Now there's no fun for people, they know everything that's going to happen," and they said "That's not the story of the show, how does it affect our people?"
No matter what, when we come back, unless it's the next day, the Kennedy assassination will affect the characters lives on the show, it just will because it just did. Am I going to do the drama of that moment? I feel like there were people who were there who lived through it who have documented it in such profound ways that I don't know if I want to add myself onto it.
Is there anything you feel you missed, either from a historic or character perspective, by jumping as far ahead as you did?
There is something about the ascendancy. Kennedy did this magnificent transformation between the election and the inauguration of becoming the president, and polls after he was inaugurated a year later, the election was 50-50, but polls when you asked people after, it was like 75-25 that people said they voted for him. I missed out to some degree of that love affair the public had with Kennedy, because this was the last good year for him.
It's why I picked this year, why "American Graffiti," "Hairspray," and "Animal House" were all set in the same year as this season, because it was relatively uneventful. Whether the assassination or the missile crisis changed everything, from 1962 on, there is the beginning of this unraveling. I think the fact that the president could be assassinated and that someone wanted to do that showed that everything could be undone.
Does Betty go back to Don only because she's pregnant?
I don't know, but I certainly felt that, like many people of that era, that's what's holding them together, that she's going to have another baby. She was really thinking about how to move on without him. I'd like to believe that's the reason. But I don't know. He could have put on a massive charm offensive. Roger said it to him, in "Six Month Leave," "You're creative, try the grand gesture."
So does she have anonymous sex with that guy in the bar so she can feel like she's on more equal footing when she goes back to Don?
That's part of it. This is a triple witching hour for a woman in that situation. She is pregnant, which is actually, believe it or not for a woman of that era, sexually liberating. There's no risk. She is drunk. She is angry, and it's the end of the world. There is a feeling of a lack of consequences, because the bombs are going to come in five minutes. But I think she has put herself on equal footing. To me, it was more about going back to episode one, this woman is in a very vulnerable place to begin with. She's been playing with fire. Where she is when she's back there, and that guy, the handsomest man on the planet just happened to walk in there -- there's not a woman in the world who wouldn't say, "Yeah, that guy would make me rethink my fidelity."
Let's not forget what happened with Arthur and Sarah. It is a huge sea change with Betty, who's been flirting with these things. She's a hypocrite. She's very proud of her ability to not be Don. Has she been compromised by stooping to his level? She told that to Sarah Beth, and I kind of agree with her: Just because she told them they'd hit it off and encouraged them, and it might have been malicious or whatever, no one told them to go through with it. The act of going through with it is a different moral code.
But how could she say it's anything but equal footing? Here, she's got nothing to lose. It's one of my favorite moments, as a storyteller, I love starting that story with the fact that she's pregnant. It's so bold. You think the whole thing is going to be some revelation of that, but it's there in the first line. I just love the way January puts her hand to her head and says, "I can't believe this." It's just so true. And I have my amazing production designers and cinematographers, Janie's costumes, and they found that needlepoint for me – my God! – with the deer, the baby deer.
How did it feel the night you won the Emmys?
It was completely -- I wouldn't say it was surreal, because I got to be in it and experience it, but it was an incredible validation. It was a real feeling of achievement. I think if I was home and had nothing to do with the show I would have felt the same way I felt being the guy getting it. This is a great year for television, I felt incredible to be singled out in this year. The years I watched "The Sopranos" not win, for four years, and you get this contempt for the masses – "Oh the audience is stupider, how come nobody loves this and I do?" – and this was cool. The show got picked because it was good and the people in this organization watched the show and felt like it had gone somewhere else. All this stuff is going through your head and I'm looking at my wife thinking about the first three years we were married and I didn't earn a dollar.
It's been quite a journey. I've been at a lot of places in my career where some stranger has pulled me aside and said "You better enjoy this, it doesn't get better than this." I feel very lucky. I've always seen myself as an underdog and part of it is reflected in my contempt for authority, which makes me very hard to work with, and here we are at this channel, I'm making this pilot at AMC, all my friends are working in network TV, there was concern and a little bit of pity for me, that this is where I ended up after "The Sopranos." In my heart, I was like, "You don't understand, I got to do my show. I did not get destroyed, all of us were on the same team, I got to make something very particular and very peculiar." That was all in it. I was very grateful. It was one of those things where you can't put it into words. You just can't believe it. People were predicting it, and now I'm going, "We're going to look so bad when we don't win it, I'm going to have to be embarrassed." I felt a lot of affection for people, admiration, and I wrote it eight years ago.
Good talking to you, and I hope everything works out so we're having a similar conversation about season three a year from now.
I'm sure it will. I have every intention of continuing with this. It just started. I'm flattered that people are interested in it. I love that we have fans of the show.
Reviewing the two Thursday medical shows together seems to be working, so spoilers for "Grey's Anatomy" and then "ER" coming up just as soon as I find some unkosher animals to stab...
