Matthew Weiner

Like David Simon ( The Wire ), another popular series creator, Matthew Weiner was born in Baltimore. He grew up in a wealthy, highly educated Jewish family: his father was one of the most eminent neurologists in the country and her mother a lawyer who left her profession to dedicate herself to the family. The conversations at lunchtime could be the most interesting, debates on the most diverse topics. In this environment, a curious and intelligent boy grew up who never lived up to the expectations of his strict father. So, contrary to family tradition, he went to study Humanities at Wesleyan University.

Before dedicating himself to writing, the young Weiner tried his hand at acting, but gave it up when he realized he was not material for a leading man. Later, he studied film at USC in Los Angeles and after a time in the dry dock jobs began to come to him: first writing jokes for a series called Party Girl , and later doing episodes for The Naked Truth and Becker . While working on the latter, he began to come up with the skeleton for Mad Men . With the pilot episode under his belt, he got a job as a staff writer on The Sopranos , which he worked on for a while, until he got AMC to produce his own series.

Mad Men was the result of a multi-year writing and documentation effort; an arduous task that gave rise to a creation as brilliant in form as in content, as interesting from the historical as thematic point of view. Through the workers of an advertising company in the seventies, this series builds the portrait of a time in the United States that is bright on the surface and dark in the underlying reality, like the men and women who star in it. We will not find a moral judgment of the actions of its characters, but rather descriptions and samples of their decline because, as its creator says, it is a series that “recognizes that it is difficult to be a person.”

Don Draper, the protagonist of Mad Men played by Jon Hamm , is the greatest exponent of the man’s problems of the time. Existential anguish, search for continuous pleasure as a palliative, identity crisis. Don is a self-made man in the most literal sense of the expression. Like Jay Gatsby, he made himself up completely, forgetting his past, rejecting his origins, becoming a publicity product as elegant as he was corrupt, with as much security as anxiety. In it, advertising is work and metaphor.

Weiner is first and foremost a writer, and this is perfectly evident in the approach of his masterpiece, which progresses little by little, propelled by its complex characters, like a great novel in which human emotions matter more than action. Talented, irregular –it is difficult to guess that he is the director and screenwriter of Are You Here- , educated and humane: this is one of the showrunners who have shaped the new golden age of the small screen.

With Mad Men , Matthew went from being a good staff writer, unknown to the general public, to becoming one of the most recognized personalities on television today. This is attested by the 4 Emmy Awards for Best Drama and the 3 Golden Globes in the same category.

Unlike the characters that inhabit his work, Weiner is a family man, happily married with four children. The eldest of them, Marten Holden Weiner, is an actor and has worked on Mad Men , in which he played Glen Bishop, a young man who had an affair with Don Draper’s daughter.