Eight years after its last episode aired, a Mad Men reunion took place at the WGA strike outside Netflix in Hollywood on Tuesday morning.
The beloved television show’s creator Matthew Weiner, actress Christina Hendricks, and former Mad Men writers including Semi Challas, Jason Grote, Janet Leahy, and André and Maria Jacquemetton, some of whom wore Mad Men T-shirts, picketed together amid an endless stream of supportive honks from cars driving by on Sunset Boulevard and striking writers’ chants.
“The strike is a struggle and it’s not pleasant,” Weiner tells Los Angeles. “We need a bright spot every once in a while and there is something beautiful about breaking up this difficult job [picketing], that’s even harder than writing, with a [Mad Men] reunion. I really miss the people, so that’s why today is so much fun. This will propel us at least another week.”
The critically acclaimed AMC series, which lasted seven seasons after its debut in 2007, was one of the most influential television shows in recent history, making stars out of cast members including Jon Hamm and Hendricks.
It was also revered for its sharp writing. Weiner, who started as a scribe on The Sopranos and created the television anthology series The Romanoffs after Mad Men, says it took time to realize how much he loved writing.
There was “so much pressure on me because it was my livelihood,” he says. “But I’ve learned that I love being in the flow. I love telling the truth. I love that telling conversations about the truth has many sides, and filtering my own experiences of my life and others—because, God knows, I’m a vampire—and turning them into a dynamic that I know is going to be as interesting to other people as it is to me.”
Erin Levy, who started as a Mad Men writer’s assistant before becoming a staff writer during the show’s third season, says Weiner’s passion for writing extends to his nurturance of his team. “Matt’s very encouraging to all of the younger writers on his support staff—teaching us how he did it and the struggles we’ll come across and being very encouraging and promoting us. He promoted a lot of people on the show.”
“I’m super proud of the fact that I hired so many great people,” Weiner adds. “Five of the writers’ assistants I had are now showrunners. People came there no matter what job they were in, because they were interested in writing and they could see that it was being expressed. The actors came for the writing too.”
Like her Mad Men character, the audacious Joan Harris, Hendricks fights for what she believes in and also showed solidarity with writers at the picket lines during the last WGA strike in 2007-2008.
“For a very, very long time, the networks and the studios have been getting way more than their share and it’s time that we allot who’s due what’s due and we’ve got to fight for it,” she says.
Reflecting the lasting impact of Hendricks’s character, writer Elizabeth Johnson and art department production assistant Kelsey Wright both showed up at the picket line dressed as Joan Harris, wearing colorful sixties dresses and oversized sunglasses, with their hair piled on top of their heads.
“Joan’s one of the strongest characters on television,” Wright says. “She’s someone to be reckoned with when it comes to not getting what she deserves, so she’s the absolute best character to emulate and bring to a strike.”
Appreciating the Joan look-alikes, a delighted Hendricks, dressed casually in all black, smiled and quipped, “I feel like I should go home and change into something else.”
Despite the picket line’s convivial atmosphere, however, none of the writers had lost sight of the severity of what was at stake for the future of their livelihoods.
“It is wonderful to have the solidarity and to see people I’ve worked with on various jobs over the years, but it’s not a party,” former Mad Men writer Jason Grote says. “This is an existential threat to the entire entertainment industry. A lot of what’s going on is that people at the executive level for a lot of these studios are the same people who have hollowed out manufacturing and retail in this country.”
Weiner adds: “I don’t want to be the last generation that can put their kids through college with this job. We can’t let them [streamers and studios] use our love of our work against us. … I watch TV. I have no contempt for the masses. That is my audience. There is no snobbery about it, and you’re left wondering how we got into a situation where everything is a sequel, where everything is completely derivative. It’s just about, ‘How lean can I make it? How much can I push up the stock price? And when can I cash in?’ I wonder if [Warner Bros. Discovery CEO] David Zaslav will even be in the entertainment business. I wonder if this is just a big gambit to just get as rich as possible, because he certainly doesn’t seem to have any interest in having a cultural impact.”
Echoing Weiner’s sentiments, former Mad Men writer Maria Jacquemetton says, “It all starts with the script. If you don’t have a good script, you’re relying on what? It’s sad because the golden age of television has been killed by corporate greed.”
Wearing a WGA T-shirt and baseball cap, author and filmmaker Justine Bateman, a friend of Weiner’s, was also at the picket line Tuesday.
“Matt and I have been picketing together, but I didn’t know there would be a Mad Men reunion today,” she says. “What a great show.”
Fiercely outspoken against AI, one of the biggest issues fueling the writer’s strike in addition to streaming residuals, Bateman recently penned an op-ed for Newsweek, has made appearances on television news programs, and posts regularly to social media about the dangers of what she calls the “AI tsunami.”
With a computer science degree from UCLA, she says that she is not against tech, but stresses that it should not be the primary focus in society and that not only does AI not belong in the arts, it is potentially completely destructive.
“If you don’t have very, very strict restrictions, you lose the whole profession, and the worst part of it is that these AI programs are trained on all these writers’ past work,” Bateman says. “It’s not like something new came onto the scene and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, what’s this brand new thing?’ No. It’s, ‘What’s this thing that’s using all of our work?’ It’s not the same. It’s not the future.”
Bateman adds that she can’t fathom using ChatGPT as a writing tool. “I don’t want to use it,” she says. “I will never use it. I don’t see the point. It would be like asking someone to have your orgasms for you, or asking someone to eat something really delicious for you. I don’t get it. I can’t relate to it. I want to go in the direction of the future. I want to get more honest. I want to be able to stand on the shoulders of the giants of the screenwriters and filmmakers I admire and go beyond that, and with ChatGPT it’s absolutely impossible.”
Former Mad Men writer Semi Challas also points to the human touch, saying, “Mad Men couldn’t be done by AI. … It doesn’t come out of metrics. Mad Men was from the incredible creative brain of Matthew Weiner and there’s nothing like that brain and all of these writers on the line have amazing, original, idiosyncratic ideas and that’s what breaks through.”
Heather Jeng Bladt, who was a Mad Men writer’s assistant before writing an episode in season 7, agrees that AI is ill-equipped to write like humans, but she remains fearful about the looming threat.
“AI is going to replace us if we don’t figure out how to put sanctions on it,” Bladt offers. “That’s speaking to our humanity. Can we as humans come together to stop what we’ve created?”
“It’s scary, but the genie’s out of the bottle and there’s no way to put it back in, so you wonder what’s going to happen,” former Mad Men writer André Jacquemetton adds. “Hopefully, we can pivot and work with it and somehow benefit from it. It won’t replace us. We still need people to do it. If there’s a way of containing it, that’s what we need to figure out.”
As writers voiced their opinions, fears, and grievances about the future of the entertainment industry, one remained optimistic. “We’ll just keep going because writers don’t stop,” says Janet Leahy. “As long as it takes, we’ll be fine. Both sides have to come together and we have to resolve this in a way that is good for everybody. The AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) just haven’t come to their senses yet. As soon as they realize that we have to come together and they are ready to come back, we’re here for them. It’s going to get resolved, but the system is broken and we need to solve it together. No acrimony. Just get it done.”
The WGA strike is currently in its ninth week. The WGA strike in 2007-2008 lasted 100 days.
