World Screen @ 35: Mad Men

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at how the success of The Sopranos influenced significant changes in programming and the fortunes of several basic cable channels. Today, we focus on Mad Men and how it turned AMC into a must-watch destination for quality television.

MAD MEN
In the multichannel universe of the late 1990s and early 2000s, cable networks needed to establish clear brand identities to help them stand out from the competition. Their brand attributes communicated to viewers what they could expect from their programming. The cable network was the mother ship, the shows the precious cargo.

By the mid-2000s, the industry began witnessing a reversal of a historic television trend. No longer did channels premiere shows; high-quality shows that hit the cultural zeitgeist had the capacity to turn an otherwise little-known channel into a must-watch destination.

As Joshua Sapan, the president and CEO of AMC Networks, said in a 2011 interview, “If there are imperatives in the world of television, they are normally found in the world of sports and great events. But there are certain dramas or TV shows that move into the spectrum of imperative—they are must-have shows. Mad Men is a must-have because of its cultural resonance and watercooler effect…Mad Men’s quality also creates an imperative because it has the effect of elevating what people think of television.”

Mad Men, a period drama about men and women who worked in the New York advertising industry from the 1960s to 1970, was created by Matthew Weiner. It aired on AMC from 2007 to 2015. Hailed as one of the best shows in television’s history for its writing, acting and historical accuracy, Mad Men won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama four years in a row, from 2008 to 2011.

“I wanted to show how different things were back then, but also my nature is to show how similar things are [today],” said Weiner in a 2009 interview. “And even though the attitudes are less institutionalized and thank God there is legal protection at work, for the most part, I find that a lot of these things haven’t really changed. I really wanted to show that when we look at history and when we look at people’s lives before us, we act very wisely and judgmental because we know what happened and how things have turned out. But it’s kind of foolish because to some degree, people don’t change and you should recognize these people and recognize a lot of their desires and hopes and obstacles from your own life.”

Weiner researched the period for years before writing the show. He read about advertising as well as fiction and watched movies from the time. “I’ve also always been interested in people who are older than me and the stories they tell. Even though they are warped sometimes in their memories and inaccurate in many ways, I just loved hearing them and that was really a big part of the research—hearing someone tell a story about seeing a movie and how that influenced them. And I especially loved hearing women tell about going to New York to get a job and then hearing about those offices. Some of it is filled with outrage and some of it is filled with the wonder of being in New York at that time. And then I’d hear about a 21-year-old at his first job. I was interested in men and what the definition of masculinity was and is. And about our fathers and that generation going from the Depression into really having influence in the world and the power that came with that. But I was also interested in the women. I read Sex and the Single Girl [by Helen Gurley Brown], which came out in 1962 and The Feminine Mystique [by Betty Friedan], which came out in 1963, in the same week. That really told me that I had a TV show.”

Mad Men was also credited with faithfully depicting the era. Weiner paid meticulous attention to all details from the furniture and decor to the clothing and accessories. “I want to do something that has a sense of actual time travel and reality from the period, and not use the period as a stylistic device. I really feel that a well-appointed interior and its objects are all part of our experience of our life. So I try to get a level of accuracy about everything. And I try to fill it with objects. I want it to be filled with clutter and garbage. We had a philosophy right from the beginning—I told the production designers and everyone at every point—number one was that all the ashtrays always had to be full. Because that’s what I remember, ashes everywhere and garbage being on people’s desks and personal artifacts and the furniture was not all from 1960; it was from 1940 and the 1800s. The ultimate ’50s house is not a bunch of modern stuff; the ultimate bourgeois ’50s house is filled with chintz and colonial antiques and Early American furniture.

“All of this detail serves to create a reality and it helps the actors, and the audience, realize they are going to be immersed in this experience,” continued Weiner. “It requires a lot of care and research, but I have amazing people working in every department who are interested in this accuracy. They know it’s related to the lives of real people.”

Jon Hamm, who played the handsome, gifted and debonair advertising executive Don Draper, said in a 2011 interview, “When we started making the first episode of Mad Men, it was for a very tiny network in the U.S. that no one had really ever heard of and that did not have a history of making original programming. We all took a risk as actors signing on for this. But what the script had going for it was that it was tremendously well written by Matthew Weiner, who was coming off one of the greatest shows in the history of television, The Sopranos. So we all decided we love this show. We don’t care that it’s not on some huge network, that it’s not got some huge studio behind it. We all were basically these little engines that could. And we decided that this is such a different show, and such an interesting piece of television that we wanted to be a part of it. And we created something that we were very proud of.”

EXPLORING MORALITY
Weiner, who had worked as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos, knew the value of exploring the good and bad in his characters, in peeling back the layers of their personalities—showing people with compromised moral compasses.

Weiner said in 2012, “The morality of their world is very much like our world. Part of why I am telling the story is because it is really hard to be a person. We are all trying to be moral and we all have a kind of warped perception of what that is. Religion of any kind is based on sin and starting over or having someone else help you start over or having it in your heart to start over. I really believe this—and I hope I am never proved wrong because it would be shocking—but even people who we perceive clearly to be bad or evil have a reason for what they are doing. They don’t see it as a chance to do evil; they see it as paying people back, or righting a wrong, or evening the score, or controlling someone who has wronged them. I feel that Don [Draper], in particular, is always doing the right thing, that Don is moral, but it’s very situational and these things conflict with each other. He has a good heart and is trying hard, but he really doesn’t make it a lot of times. He feels bad about it, which helps, and he looks like Jon Hamm, which helps! But he is not really on any abstract scale an ethical or moral person. But he is trying really hard and there are people who are worse than him. That’s life. Betty Draper is really trying hard to be a good mother and to think of other people, but she is not great at it. She probably shouldn’t have been a mom and gets controlled by her vanity and becomes jealous. All these childish, embarrassing emotions that we want to hide, she has them and she expresses them. Is she an immoral person? No. It’s part of the story of the show and it’s part of that generation. How are you going to be judged as being moral when you are sent off to kill people by the government? Murder is wrong, but it’s not if you are in a war—well, that’s already very confusing, right?”

The imperfect men and women Weiner created were not only relatable to the audience but also fun and engaging for the actors. Elisabeth Moss, who played Peggy Olson, said in a 2011 interview, “That’s where the drama comes from; it’s when you have flaws and things are complicated and mistakes are made, that causes the chain reaction that makes for interesting television. And so, to have these characters that have double lives, and these secrets, and these lies, and problems—that’s something that you want to play. You don’t want to play the person who just has one note or one side to them and is very simple, and sweet, and everything just works out perfectly. You want to play something that is not working out so well.”

Hamm believes the nature of the characters on Mad Men is what made the show so popular in the U.S. and around the world. “He’s created these incredibly flawed characters that make so many bad decisions, that make so many mistakes, and yet are so eminently relatable and you can identify with them, and you can actually hope that someday they’ll have redemption. That’s what people identify with. I think that’s why the show has reached out beyond just a Stateside audience and has really resonated with people in South America and Scandinavia and Mexico and Germany. People are finding that’s the human condition. And that, nestled into this show, is what I think made it resonate worldwide.”

When asked if there was a moral compass to the show, Moss replied. “The great thing about the show is that the characters make mistakes and they do bad things. But they’re not bad people, and that’s very true to life. That’s very true to human beings. It’s so much about people trying to do the right thing, or trying to make their way, trying to be happy. And their jobs [involve] selling happiness every day to the public. That against their own struggle for their own personal happiness is very interesting.”

Hamm agreed. “It’s a story about people trying to do the best they can with what they have, which is, in many ways, the American dream,” he said. “Using what you have to get what you want. But it’s the wonderful irony of the whole thing—these are people whose job is to define and sell happiness. And the fact that they are, for the most part, unclear as to their own happiness is the beautiful irony. That’s what I love about the show—the fact that it really explores that irony.”

While Hamm had been nominated for an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for each year Mad Men was on the air, he finally won the statuette in 2015, the same year as the series’ final season.

Commenting on Mad Men’s seven-season run, Weiner said in 2015, “I feel so lucky that we got to do something so peculiar. I think that it will be a business model in some ways, as every small basic-cable channel goes into original programming, that you can do something and change your business with one show. That I am happy about, but creatively, honestly, having spent the last ten years doing a show about history, it would be insane to predict or guess what the legacy of it is. I hope that it stands out as a piece of originality that was successful. That is a rare moment and that is something that I would hope it would be known for. It’s very hard to encourage people to be original because it’s brutal. I feel so grateful that they let us do this weird and unusual show. It really has proven to be unlike anything else. I didn’t know that when we were doing it—it feels like normal TV to me—but now I’m aware of it.”

In 2008, when Mad Men had only been on for one season, another show premiered that redefined serialized drama and secured AMC’s position as a destination for superb television. In its first season, however, Breaking Bad was hardly noticed.

“We began favorably with Mad Men and followed it with Breaking Bad, now in its fourth season, and it’s actually having higher ratings than we’d experienced and a tremendous critical reception,” said Sapan in a 2011 interview. Those two shows were followed by The Walking Dead and The Killing, adapted from the wildly successful Danish television series Forbrydelsen. “What all those shows have in common is that they are cinematic-like,” continued Sapan. “I hope they really do reflect the reverence that we have for the writing and the artistry that is now manifest on TV, oftentimes to a greater extent than it is in the world of commercial film. We have had the good fortune of striking a responsive chord with consumers and with every other group that we deal with, so it’s had a very beneficial effect and has transformed the perception of AMC.”

We will explore the phenomenon that was Breaking Bad in our next post.