Weiner talking up Mad Men

GONE MAD: A week after the last episode of season two ends, Mad Men will officially join the pop culture trivia game canon with a spoof of the AMC show in the annual Simpsons Halloween Treehouse Of Horror episode.

In a segment that begins with Homer in silhouette falling slowly between skyscrapers covered in advertising images – a tribute to Mad Men’s iconic title sequence – the show satirizes the use of dead celebrities in advertising, according to a post on the New York Post’s TV blog.

You’ll have to indulge me with another Mad Men column – the show goes away for 9 months after this Sunday, and all I’ll have to work with until then will be the negotiations between Matt Weiner and the show’s producers and network to get Mad Men’s creator on board for season three, a sticky situation that the Post insists will attract Weiner’s old employer, HBO, around the show like some kind of well-capitalized carrion bird.

With the end of the season in sight, Weiner has been giving interviews in the U.S., including a long Q&A with Variety where he admitted that he’d had the whole back story for Jon Hamm’s Don Draper percolating in his head for years – since before he was a writer on The Sopranos, in fact – but that he has only the vaguest idea of how the show will end. One thing he does know is that, when season three begins at some point after late 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy’s assassination won’t be part of the action.

“I know one thing,” Weiner told Variety, “which is that I think everybody’s seen enough of the Kennedy assassination. I know I have. It’s certainly going to affect the show and their lives and I guess we’ll see their reaction. But I definitely don’t want to go through that dramatically. It’s probably the most dramatized event that I’ve experienced in my life, at least for my age. It’s something I’ve seen over and over and over and over again. As I writer, I don’t really know what I could add to it.”

Even more happily, Weiner insisted that despite the historical setting, the show is about “the humanity of the characters in their life, unrelated to historic events, is what I’m most fascinated by. And so to ask if I’m going to end the show when Don is 50, that's what you should be thinking about and not if I’m going to end it with Don in a disco. The whole purpose of doing this was to show how it happened and how on some level it must have affected regular people and how history does affect regular people.”