Mad Men's Matthew Weiner: This Season's About Change

Vodka gimlet or old fashioned? Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner answered questions over cocktails after last night’s screening of an episode from the AMC drama and offered his own musings to the audience about the civil rights movement.

“In hindsight, did you know how important that was?” he said. “Probably not.”

The characters in Mad Men sure don’t. Copywriter Paul Kinsey rides a bus to Mississippi with his black girlfriend in protest, and Betty, the wife of protagonist Don Draper, suggests to her black maid that maybe “now” isn’t the right time for desegregation. But save those few moments, the characters don’t know anything is amiss while Marilyn Monroe’s death turns an entire episode on its head.

“What’s been fascinating for me is to look at history and how we interact with it,” Weiner said. “How big does something have to be to penetrate our lives?”

The show is a period piece and something personal—to Weiner, to his peers who grew up in New York in the 1960s and perhaps to a younger generation that can recognize what’s been lost and realized in the decades since.

Conrad Hilton, a self-made man in the real hotelier’s likeness, has become central to the plot this season. After hiring Draper for several accounts, he’s acted liked a client and a father, and lost-boy Draper has gobbled up his attention.

Like his real-life counterpart, Hilton is “magnanimous, generous and trying to bring our standard of living to the world,” Weiner said. “I feel like that’s something we’ve lost.”

More literally, the show lost office manager Joan Harris nee Holloway this season when she left her job for her husband. Joan was one of the show's few women that could double as a role model. She showed a self-empowered prowess unrivaled by even the sole female copywriter, Peggy Olsen. But Joan left the Sterling Cooper office at her husband's request—shortly after their marriage, and after he raped her.

Weiner was uneasy about using rape in the show by virtue of how easily it "exploits" people's emotions, but since the episode aired, he said he's become a "repository for people's pain." Viewers have approached him to say that he told their stories.

"There's a lot of violence in this country," Weiner said. "This season is about expectation. It's about change."