Matthew Weiner's best work gives selfish people time to make a persuasive case for themselves. Mad Men earns our admiration through patience and wit, though its treatment of the past can become smug.
Fi1m perspective
A cruel remark in Mad Men (2007) can sound so much like ordinary office conversation that the laugh comes before the objection. We laughed at that casual cruelty, then felt uncomfortable about having laughed. Weiner and his fellow writers allow people to explain their selfishness without asking us to accept the explanation. This is excellent television because the characters remain interesting even when their excuses do not stand up. The careful 1960s New York advertising setting matters, but the pleasure is in listening to somebody make bad conduct sound sensible.
Weiner's beginnings in sitcoms make sense when we hear how carefully those jokes are placed. He wrote the Mad Men pilot while working on Becker, then joined the writing staff of The Sopranos (1999) for its final seasons under David Chase. We recommend that series without hesitation, but our admiration for it is not a reason to give Weiner credit for the whole. His account of developing separate character stories and looking for their intersections helps explain the patience of Mad Men. Its seven seasons give those overlapping stories room to develop, rather than requiring every character's difficulties to be settled within an episode.
There are times when the writing makes our judgement too easy. Mad Men occasionally presents the prejudices of its period as an opportunity for us to feel pleased with ourselves. We find it less persuasive when recognising an ugly attitude seems to be enough; the performances usually make the offending character harder to dismiss than that. Semi Chellas was among the programme's writers, and any account of Weiner's achievement needs to leave room for those colleagues and for the cast.
His first feature, Are You Here (2013), concerns male friendship and self-knowledge, but its wandering story and uncertain comic tone make it a less convincing place to begin. The Romanoffs (2018) moved to an anthology format, with Chellas again among his writing collaborators. That is a different test for a writer-director whose strength is following the same people across several seasons. Start with Mad Men, and allow it more than a single evening.
Biography
Matthew Hoffman Weiner is an American television writer, producer and director. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he studied at Wesleyan University and earned an MFA from the University of Southern California. He began his career writing for sitcoms including Becker (1998–2004) and Andy Richter Controls the Universe (2002–2003).
Weiner wrote the pilot for Mad Men as a spec script while working on Becker. It led to his hiring on The Sopranos, where he served as a writer and producer on the final three seasons (2004–2007). He subsequently created, wrote and directed Mad Men (2007–2015) for AMC, serving as showrunner throughout its seven seasons.
Weiner later wrote, directed and produced the feature film Are You Here (2013) and created the anthology series The Romanoffs (2018). He has received nine Primetime Emmy Awards, including two for The Sopranos and seven for Mad Men.
