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Don Draper – the dapper and dashing hero of television’s cult hit Mad Men – will be a withered old man when the show winds down in a couple of years, its creator said.
The highly-stylised TV series, set in the 1960s, is wildly popular for its acerbic portrayal of a bygone era of lunches with a bevy of beverages and guilt-free smoking.
Creator Matthew Weiner said that the central character, advertising executive Draper – played by Jon Hamm – will be transported into the present as the show wraps up two seasons from now.
That means that Draper – a debonair playboy in the prime of life in the five seasons of the hit programme so far – will wrap up the series as a wizened gent in his mid-80s.
“What I’m looking for, and how I hope to end the show, is like – it’s 2011,” said Weiner of the programme that is appreciated not only as entertainment but social commentary.
“Don Draper would be 84 right now. I want to leave the show in a place where you have an idea of what it meant and how it’s related to you,” he said.
Mad Men, highlighting the suffocating perfection of life in the US during the mid-20th Century, including its moral strictures and misogyny, has received several Emmy Awards, the prize given each year to US television’s top programmes.
Weiner said the series will aspire at its end to depict the arc of Draper’s life.
“It came to me in the middle of last season. I always felt like it would be the experience of human life. And, human life has a destination,” he said.
Weiner said he looks forward to closing out Mad Men while the show is still riding high with viewers.
“All I want to do is not wear out the generous welcome,” he said.
While he anticipates that the show’s end will come in season seven, Weiner said the details remain to be sorted out.
