Matthew Weiner has a ready response to baby boomers who tell him “Mad Men” has forgotten parts of the 1960s: “I’m not telling your story. I’m telling the story of your parents or your grandparents.”
The “Mad Men” creator told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s “Colbert Report” that many baby boomers think the show is about them. It’s not.
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“I think that our view of the ’60s has been passed down by a certain generation that was even a little bit older than you and I are and they have a very rosy picture,” said Weiner, born in 1964, to Colbert, born in 1965. “They think they invented sex and drugs. They have a view of it that is a child’s view of it.”
He said his show is more interested in people like Don Draper and Roger Sterling who “lived through some fairly interesting things like World War II and the Great Depression.” Their children believed they created things like free love, but they didn’t, Weiner said.
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“There was a generation that was asked very little of,” Weiner said. “They got education, they got a lot of entertainment, they got a lot of spending money, they became the focus of the economy, of entertainment, of everything. There was a war going on which they were supposed to fight, and some of them didn’t. The generation before them, all of them fought.”
“I don’t have a judgment on it, necessarily” he said, adding: “That sounded really judgmental.”
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Colbert also gave Weiner, a “Sopranos” veteran, a suggestion on how to conclude “Mad Men.” He said he would be happy if Don Draper “turned to the camera and he explained the ending of ‘The Sopranos.’”
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