We haven't heard about Mad Men since we saw Don Draper sunbathing and reading The Inferno last October during the shooting of Season 6, but news came out this morning that the show would be returning with a two-hour season premiere on April 7th... and showrunner Matthew Weiner says, "The season is about Don, and I made a commitment to tell a full story, no matter what the consequences are.”
He told EW that the premiere is "different than last year’s... This year it’s really constructed like a film." (Though, last year he also said the two-hour premiere would be like a movie.) Weiner added, "It is its own story and hopefully it foreshadows the rest of the season. You should know what happened at the end of last season before you see the episode. The whole season is in reference to last season.”
So what happened at the end of last season? The final scene shows Don leaving Megan at a commercial shoot he landed for her, and sitting at a bar alone. At the time, Weiner had said: "I envisioned that Don would be in that bar. That was the last image, always, that someone would come up and say, 'Are you alone?' And we wouldn’t know what he answers." The show closes with that scene, and Nancy Sinatra's theme song to "You Only Live Twice" (a 1967 James Bond film) playing.
Weiner says that this time around, "I want to acknowledge the fact that the audience knows this man very well, so what he does is never going to surprise them. How he does it and why he does it should surprise them." The photos that leaked from the Hawaii shoot show that Don and Megan will be together and seemingly happy, even if briefly, but Weiner notes that overall Megan's "independence was really a disappointment for [Don]. It really changed his fantasy of what that relationship would be. Is he threatened by it? Is that the thing that drives him to be unfaithful? I don’t know."
When we meet back up with the happy couple, Weiner says that "more than a week" will have passed, but won't get into specifics. Though from the photos that leaked it seems like we'll still be in the late 1960s. Weiner talked to Salon a little bit about what writing 1966—the year that last season took place—was like, recalling "the riots, the Richard Speck murders and the Texas Tower shooting" that appeared in the show's backdrop last season. What historical markers will make it into this next season?
