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Mad Men creator feeds determination to produce strong characters we can't get enough of By Paige Albiniak
For many television scribes, writing and executive producing what a fair number have heralded to be the best show ever to hit the air - The Sopranos - might have been enough. For Matt Weiner, it was just the beginning.
Mad Men, the series now most associated with Weiner, began its life as a spec script Weiner wrote in 2000 while he was working on the CBS sitcom Becker. The script helped Weiner get his job on The Sopranos.
"I wanted to make a show that I wanted to watch," says Weiner of Mad Men. "I thought there could be a more realistic version of what it was like for adults to go through that period in our history. "I grew up in the '80s, and nostalgia for the '5Os was looming very heavily over the country. The Boomers, the ruling age group, had reached the apex of their power and they were constantly reminiscing and talking about a world that didn't exist anymore. We were going through a very conservative period in America."
When The Sopranos wrapped in 2007, Weiner started thinking about turning Mad Men - a show about working in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue in the 1960s - into a series. Although it seemed like an obvious fit for Weiner's previous home of HBO, the premium network passed. So, too, did Showtime, leaving Weiner at a dead end.
Enter...