EXCLUSIVE: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner is returning to television with a high-profile new series. After heated bidding between six entities, we have learned that the project has landed at The Weinstein Company and Amazon to air on the streaming service, in a $70 million commitment for eight-episode straight-to-series order. Series will be co-financed by TWC and Amazon.
All parties just confirmed the deal to Deadline. Said Weiner: “In a time when there are so many options for entertainment, it’s been tremendous to see how Roy Price and Amazon have taken center stage by distinguishing themselves through bold choices. I am truly excited to have this opportunity to work with risk takers like them and Harvey and The Weinstein Company who have a proven, longstanding commitment to creative voices and innovation.”
After re-creating the 1960s in his iconic AMC series Mad Men, Weiner is turning his attention to present day with the untitled series, which we hear is contemporary anthology set in multiple locations worldwide. Weiner is creating, writing and executive producing. He also is expected to direct about half the episodes in the first season, we hear.
Some Jew who forced his talentless son on blond Aryan women.
Brandon Campbell
>Weiner >good
>amazon >present day >multiple locations world wide >not so good
I'm going to wait till I see a trailer
David Lee
About time. It's been over a year now and we haven't had a single show to carry the torch forward since Mad Men ended.
Logan Bailey
Netflix literally BTFO
Alexander Diaz
>Amazon >pulling together anything worth watching whatsoever
Matthew Reed
Who /rewatching Mad Men/ here?
Michael Nguyen
Been doing that with a buddy who has never seen it. Finished season 4 awhile ago. It's amazing how rewatchable the show is, this is my 3rd time seeing it and I can't wait to start season 5.
Nathaniel Perez
>contemporary anthology set in multiple locations worldwide
Let me guess: lesbians, gays, trannies, poor refugees, Nazis, racists...
Ryan Brown
pls no
Weiner is supposed to be one of the good ones
Ryan James
Literally how?
The producers wanted to celebrate the replacement of this Old Anglo Elite by a Rainbow Coalition including women, gays, and minorities, chiefly Jews, given that the production crew is predominantly Jewish. In the very first episode, Roger Sterling asks Don Draper whether the agency has ever hired a Jewish copywriter. "Not on my watch," jokes Don. It's 1960. In the coming decade however, the agency is going to recruit many Jewish copywriters and Black secretaries.
Nevertheless, to show how hard it was for the Rainbow Coalition to overthrow this Old Anglo Elite, the producers had to depict it as a formidable enemy: a caste of good-looking, refined, well-mannered, educated aristocrats. By thus doing, they made this elite appealing, and many viewers could conclude that they would rather be ruled by such a gang than by the current one.
Gavin Lopez
Don Draper is the creative director of Sterling Cooper, a relatively small ad agency on Madison Avenue. He's tall, strong, handsome, always perfectly-dressed, smart (though not particularly educated), socially savvy and uncannily successful. Successful in his work, and, of course, successful with women. Despite having a wife that would be rated as a “9” if not a “10” in the manosphere (Betty Hofstadt, played by Nordic beauty queen January Jones), he enjoys the company of many other women, who enable him to escape the sanitized boredom of his white-picket-fenced suburban house®.
We don't see Don Draper work much. He's always late, even for meetings, spends most of his office time smoking, drinking (Canadian Club rye at work, “Old Fashioned” cocktails at bars), and taking naps to recover from it all. When the afternoon comes, he often calls it a day to join some mistress in a luxurious hotel room. Despite that, every one of his pitches to the clients is a home-run, making him the main money-maker of the agency (his jaw-dropping Kodak carousel presentation should be turned into a mandatory training in communication and marketing programs). This reminds us that creation requires laziness as much as hard work. All those who write for a living know that their best ideas pop up when they are doing something else, or doing nothing at all.
The main thing that can be said about Don Draper is that in the age of materialism, which has been the Postwar era so far, such a talented man couldn't express his genius in a meaningful field. Rather than being an artist, a scientist, or a statesman, he had to devote his talents to selling laxatives, ketchup, and lipstick.
Easton Davis
Any proof that advertising agencies back then were clearly opposed to Jewish copywriters? Edward Bernays himself was a fucking Jew.
Bentley Bailey
If there had to be a single one quintessential elite Anglo-Saxon on screen, that would be him. Heir of the original agency's co-founder (hence his “name on the building” he's so proud of), Roger always had it easy until the 60's. To paraphrase one of my famous countrymen, Roger “took the trouble to be born, no more,” except during the Second World War. Roger's wittiness and charms enable him to be very efficient in handling clients, but can't shield him from the cultural tsunami that washes America throughout the 60's. Unable to resist the sexual revolution, he repudiates his wife Mona in favor of an Ashkenazi secretary, Jane, who will give him no heir. Once high on LSD, Roger realizes it was a bad move, which will leave him with two alimonies to pay for. His former wife Mona only gave him a daughter, who ends up living in a rural commune with degenerates after having abandoned her “beta provider” husband and her son.
Drugs are not enough to make him forget his feeling of void, which results in an explicit recognition of his own dispossession:
Having received a Classical European education, Roger thinks he can afford the luxury of playing dumb, for example when he intentionally mixes Spanish conquistadores, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, and “Mexicans” in a single sentence. In an other episode, he explains to Pete Campbell what “Munich” (i.e., surrender) means when it comes to negotiation, only seconds before he attributes to his mother the famous Churchill quote “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Obviously, someone who knows what “Munich” means also knows who delivered this statement after the Munich Agreement of 1938. Unfortunately for Roger, the 60's are no longer the time for playing dumb, especially since his leadership is under siege.
Logan Wright
While he's not a very important character, Herman “Duck” Phillips plays the role of a scapegoat in the official narrative about the '60s. Everything in his behaviour is wrong, to the point that the whole character becomes rather incredible. Incapable of self-mastery when he's drunk, “Duck” makes fun of the speaker during an adverstising awards ceremony and tries to defecate in Roger Sterling's office (believing it's Don Draper's) after having been fired from the agency. In spite of all these flaws, he's always impeccably attired, very charming, and quite well-spoken. He's also a war hero, having killed 17 Japanese soldiers in the Battle of Okinawa. The message seems to be as follows: when a man is handsome, well-educated, and successful, there must be something deeply wrong about him. This should explain why such types have almost entirely been driven out of Western elites in favor of ugly, incompetent, and sociopathic ones . . . but I digress.
Camden Perez
Cooper is the other co-founder of the initial agency. Unlike Roger Sterling, who is a generation younger than he, Bert Cooper is a self-conscious conservative. He is very skeptical of “civil rights,” and implicitly asks she-office manager Joan Holloway/Harris to make sure the receptionist girl remains White. Bert Cooper is why conservatives can't win. Though he disagrees with the triumph of the Moral Left in the '60s, he never dares express it. Quite symbolically, he lost his testicles in a surgical operation that went wrong. He dies childless and heirless, the day Neil Armstrong sets foot on the Moon. One small step for a man, indeed . . . and one giant leap to the dustbin of history for country-club Republicans.
Samuel Reyes
Kiernan Shipka is a Jew as well
Caleb Stewart
Speaking of the Moon, the only real character of the series, hotel chain-founder Conrad Hilton (“Uncle Connie”), is a very telling one. He randomly meets Don Draper at a . . . country club, and then becomes a client for a short time. He ends his contract with the agency when Don fails to give him “Hilton on the Moon,” a literal request Don thought was only figurative. In a monologue that leaves the viewer wondering whether Hilton is mentally ill, he displays a worldview that is actually quite typical of the postwar Right:
Can we see “Uncle Connie” as a member of the dispossessed elite? Yes, if we bear in mind who one of his great-granddaughters is.
Elijah Ross
In his three-part review of the series at Counter-Currents, James J. O'Meara defined Lane Pryce as the agency's sacrificial victim. That is true, though in my opinion, O'Meara doesn't really explain how Lane Pryce is so. Pryce is a former auditor from the British company that had bought the initial Sterling Cooper agency. Then he becomes a junior partner in the new agency started by Sterling, Cooper and Draper. Due to fiscal problems with the United Kingdom, he tries to steal money from the agency. When Don confronts him about his forged check, Pryce resigns and hangs himself in his own office. I would suggest that Pryce is sacrificed for his very Britishness, the same way the Cosmic America fantasized by Conrad Hilton was born out of the sacrifice of English and British heritage. Jared Harris, who stars as Pryce, looks like the usual caricature of the English people in rival countries: a toad face at the top of a fat, listless body.
Jayden Long
Pete Campbell is maybe even more representative of this dispossession: being 10 years younger than Don Draper, he has been deprived of his birthright before he was even born. At some point in the series, the viewer learns that his ancestry in America goes back as far as the Mayflower. Yet his father found a way to dilapidate his family's fortune before dying and leaving his two sons with crumbs. Still believing in the American myth of the self-made-man, Pete thinks he's going to make up for his father's failures with hard work, only to discover that the dices have been rigged from the start against young, ambitious men like him (which, of course, is more of a concern for our generation than Pete Campbell's, who is a baby-boomer; this is not the only way the writers managed to inject contemporary issues into the series). In a half-drunk rant, Campbell expresses his impatience about being patronized by the former generation.
