You are not the only one who has dreamed of a Mad Men spin-off—perhaps about Trudy’s life in the suburbs, Betty’s hidden vulnerabilities, or Roger’s comedic hijinks. AMC, too, once wanted Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner to create a second series around one of his Emmy-winning drama’s characters. And in an oral history about the show from The Hollywood Reporter today, we learn exactly what AMC’s visions entailed.
Lionsgate TV C.O.O. Sandra Stern recalls, “When we first started negotiating with AMC [in 2010, after the show’s fourth season] one of the things they wanted was a spin-off. We talked about doing a contemporary one. Given the fact that [Mad Men] ends nearly 50 years ago, most of the characters would be dead. Sally was the one character young enough that you could see her 30 or 40 years later.”
We would season-pass—hell, series pass—a drama chronicling adult Sally Draper’s modern-day life (complete with the odd Don or Betty reference) right now if we could. Alas, we may never know what career path Don’s precocious daughter pursues or how her parents’ personal lives affect her as an adult, because Weiner nixed the idea. (Perhaps it is better off this way, though. We can’t imagine another actress embodying the character as well as Kiernan Shipka does.)
Stern reveals that they also briefly considered a spin-off centered around another female Mad Men cast member. “There was a time we wanted a Peggy spin-off, too, a la Better Call Saul, a minor character going off to L.A.” But “Matt wasn't comfortable committing to a spin-off,” and both parties were able to come to a contractual conclusion without necessitating a Mad Men–adjacent series.
Another revelation from the oral history is the actor, aside from Jon Hamm, that Weiner considered to play the show’s haunted protagonist Don Draper. Christina Wayne, former senior V.P. of scripted programming at AMC, remembers, “Matt sent us two actors: Jon Hamm and Mariska Hargitay's husband, Peter Hermann.” It sounds as though Weiner was always partial to Hamm over Hermann, the latter of whom has had recurring roles on Law & Order: SVU and Blue Bloods.
“The quality of the [casting video] that we were using sucked, and you couldn't see how good-looking Jon Hamm was,” Wayne explains. “We were like, ‘Really, this is who you think?’ And Matt said, ‘Absolutely.’ He'd been in the room, and he felt something with Jon. We had him come in again. We had to be sold, so we flew Jon to New York and took him for a drink at the Gansevoort hotel. He was nervous, but I knew that he had star potential. I whispered in his ear before he left, ‘You got the job.’”
Seven career-changing seasons into that job, Hamm admits that playing such a self-destructing character has affected him. “Obviously it's no fun to play a person who only makes the right decisions all the time, but it can be difficult to watch somebody, time and time again, who just continually makes [the same] mistakes,” the actor explains. “I think it got progressively more difficult for me. As Don’s downward spiral continued, it became kind of relentless, and that takes its toll on your psyche.”
While viewers still have seven episodes ahead of them—beginning on April 5—the cast and crew has finished filming and said their formal goodbyes to the show. Explains Hamm, “It felt very much like the end of senior year when we were wrapping up. One of our producers made a yearbook. She separated everyone into freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, depending upon how long you'd been involved. Everyone came in to take their class pictures. We had senior superlatives and all that stuff.”
And they even celebrated like high-school seniors. Admits January Jones, “On the last day, we stayed until three or four in the morning and we T.P.-d Matt's car.”
