Public image, private reality

Mad Men's writer Matthew Weiner says the Mannerist style of the 1950s, which returned in the 1980s, still lives on today. Photo / Supplied by Prime

As Mad Men moves further into the 1960s in its third season, the acclaimed series depicting the fraught lives of the creatives at a Madison Avenue advertising agency remains something unique.

It might be stuck in a nicotine-stained martini-soaked past. But as its growing haul of Emmys and Golden Globes show, it's the greatest American television drama on screen right now.

Other than its setting, the show's initial calling card was its ties to the previous greatest US television drama title-holder - The Sopranos - via its creator Matthew Weiner.

He was a writer on the series, his early Mad Men spec scripts having won him the mob job after years as a journeyman sitcom scribe.

Weiner was in New Zealand last week to be the keynote speaker at the annual conference for the Screen Production and Development Association of New Zealand (SPADA).

And speak he certainly can, his rapid-fire, digressive answers during a half-hour interview with TimeOut suggesting one happy, obsessed, perfectionist madman is behind Mad Men, a show he says isn't really about the 1960s or advertising, but how people's private realities differ to the face they show others.

"I think the show is about how hard it is to be a person and the constant regulation between your personal life, your private personal internal desires and the reality you can achieve in the world."

Weiner's world might have reached 1963, some time before the decade's cultural and political upheavals, but its period isn't the only reason the show stands out.

It's also in the way it looks and sounds, how the characters speak to each other, how the storylines subvert audience expectations, how its leading man Don Draper isn't actually Don Draper ... and more. How did this come to be this way?

Here's Weiner on Mad Men's points of difference:

It's set in the 1960s. But "the 1960s" hasn't really started yet. And they were a rerun anyway.

"I was born in 1965 and the lifestyle of the people in the show didn't disappear until 1980 for a lot of America. At the end of season two, the Cuban Missile Crisis was definitely a cultural landmark for people's attitude about the government, about each other, about personal responsibility. Part of the message of the show is that history is always in tumult. A lot of things we associate with the 60s - free love, drugs anti-establishment, anti-corporate, environmentalism - these things had already started and in fact had been cyclically represented in American culture and dismissed over and over again. And I don't think there is very much about the hippy culture that isn't related to the beatnik culture if you wanted to find the 60s that way.

"One of the premises of the show is America is always 50 per cent subversive - sometimes you are in power and sometimes you are not but it's there. If I was a historian I would say we are still in the high 50s, the Mannerist period of the 50s. Things changed so much between 1967 and 1972 clothing-wise and culturally and then changed back. I grew up in the 80s and they were in the process of changing back."

And it's set in 1960s adland for a reason.

"Advertising was in a process of change because the focus on the consumer was new and different. Someone had just figured out that design would be a great way to get people to buy new things. So you could make somebody buy a new stove every five years instead of every seven years if you came out with candy pink as an option.

"The other thing was the influx of Italians and Jews and other minorities into advertising. So the face of advertising wasn't as bland and white and aspirational and not related to reality. But the whole tension about who we want to be and who we are is what advertising is about. That is why I picked it for the show. You could do it in any time."

But it's not meant to be educational.

"I definitely don't want the show to be a history lesson. It was fascinating to me that in the first season, what I considered to be the big historical event - the [Kennedy vs Nixon] presidential election of 1960 - a large proportion of the audience had no idea who won that election. I was stunned. But I don't want to just tick these things off. I want to do them if they help me tell my story.

"So I try and make them personal and I deal with the ones that help me tell my story. It's one of the greatest fascinations about doing this series, to investigate how history and seminal events affect our lives. We are clear now on what are the turning points, once history has been analysed, and what is the accepted version."

Oh, and that's right, everyone smokes and drinks like there's no tomorrow - or at least no Surgeon General warnings as yet.

"I can't tell you the violent reaction I had about the smoking, and I was like, I can't do something about the Civil War and pretend that slavery didn't happen. And people do period pieces all the time from their childhoods and ignore the fact all the schools were segregated. Smoking didn't go away until 1990. So I was kind of disturbed by that."

They might have abused their lungs and livers but they are very well-spoken. Even if they do say some quaint things at times.

"These people are all far more eloquent than any human being could be on Earth and that's fine - for some of them like Don, it makes sense.

"But what I really want to do is have it as natural as possible. I dictate all the scripts. All of my first drafts and rewrites are done orally and I have a writer's assistant who writes it down and everything that is in there can be said and it is fairly easy to memorise.

"The thing I love about it is everyone has a reason for what they are doing and there are people saying, 'I don't understand what you are saying' to each other. The characters are not allowed to elicit information out of each other just for the audience. A lot of times a character will not understand what another character is saying and you won't find out till the next scene. It's all about maintaining some level of reality. Obviously, it's totally artificial so you have got to strike a balance.

"We use The New York Times [of the day] as our model, especially for phrases and idioms. But a lot of it is so subtle that you don't even catch it. I know I have made some mistakes, believe me, but I think we are 90 per cent there. I use literature and I use old people. Like Don tells Sally in one episode to go in and wash her teeth and Joan talks about closing the light. They are little idioms that don't exist anymore but for people of a certain age.

They dressed nicely too, but you can only have so many frocks. Or hats.

"Betty Draper is a beautiful woman with an amazing body and you would love to put all different kinds of clothes on her. But instead of putting her in a new outfit every scene, as you would in a normal show, she has a closet. She would buy a special outfit for a special occasion but for the most part you will see her repeating clothes all the time. No one ever does that.

"The young guys have already stopped wearing hats. Pete Campbell doesn't wear a hat. Then again, my grandpa wore a hat right up until he died in 1979 and he thought it was ridiculous not to wear a hat. If Don Draper's smoking doesn't catch up with him and he lives until 1980, he is going to be wearing a hat."

The show's secret formula? No formula.

"I like to play with audience expectations. I think that is what is entertaining about the show and I like the kind of entertainment that is not formula. I don't like it exclusively. I like Agatha Christie and I watch Law and Order and all kinds of procedural TV shows. But for me as a writer, what I am interested in doing and why the show stands out not just for the audience but in the marketplace is that you have no idea that is going to happen."

The last time an American TV character worked in a Madison Avenue ad agency he was married to a witch. And Don Draper thinks he's got problems at home ...

"Don't think that [60s sitcom Bewitched] hasn't crossed my mind. I know that show. When I was going through the whole history of advertising ... all of a sudden there it was the whole thing - America's contempt and love for this topic. I didn't do it on purpose but both Roger Sterling [of MM's Sterling Cooper] and Larry Tate [of Bewitched's McMann and Tate] have grey hair.

LOWDOWN

Who: Matthew Weiner, former Sopranos writer turned originator of Mad Men.

Where and when: Mad Men, season three, Prime, 9.30pm Sundays. The complete second season is out on DVD now.