Making History: A Q&A with Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner

http://time.com/37719/matthew-weiner-mad-men-q-a/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftunedin+%28TIME%3A+Tuned+In%29

I felt that he went to that pitch and he just couldn’t lie anymore. He looked at Ted and he just couldn’t lie anymore. And once that had been broken through, once he told the truth in that meeting, the next thing that happened is he had to tell Megan that he wasn’t going to California. That was one thing, another thing he was going to lose. And then they fired him. And I think that he realized that was the crucial relationship. We tried to set it up with Grandma Ida, the woman who broke into the , that Sally really doesn’t know anything about him. His children don’t know, and that means that he is never going to be close to them. And I think that in the spirit of confession that was the beginning of him reconciling who he was to tear down the façade for his children. Specifically Sally who never saw – it’s not supposed to look like an excuse, like “Hey, this is where I grew up, that’s why I’m a dirtbag.” He’s just saying, I want you to know who I am. I’m willing to risk you rejecting me because I’m so ashamed of this.

[Don's identity] is the heart of the show, not just the father’s relationship with the kid. It’s the Jay Gatsby of it all. It’s an American iconographic–it’s in our DNA, these slightly picaresque figures who built this country that inspired the show for me. Rockefeller and Bill Clinton and Sam Walton and Lee Iacocca, people who came to be the leaders in this country–all of them came from poverty and none of them talked about their childhoods, or they lied about them. They invented themselves. And there’s a psychic cost to that...

A very deep discussion about the characters and the program's place in the history it depicts.

James Poniewozik is the best entertainment writer working today.