‘Mad Men’ season 7: Matthew Weiner on why he’s not doing a ‘Better Call Saul’
“Better Phone Pete”? While “Breaking Bad” managed to form a spin-off show in “Better Call Saul” that has turned out to be pretty darn great, this is still something that “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner is shying away from. We have heard him talk a number of times as of late about his desire to not do another show in this same world, and for a number of reasons why.
However, in creating a direct comparison between the Vince Gilligan series and his own, we get what may be one of the best justifications for there not being a “Mad Men” spin-off that we have seen from him to date. After all, Weiner tells Esquire in a lengthy interview that exhaustion is a factor here, and there is so much more of the Don Draper story out there at this point than there was “Breaking Bad” at the time the show ended:
“I have seen the [‘Better Call Saul’ show] and I enjoy the show. I will say, just to make a comparison to begin with, we have 92 hours of this thing. My premise has been far more deeply exhausted, number one. Number two is when that came up I avoided it. It was put on the table. It was not a suggestion. It was one of the conditions of me continuing to work there. At that point, I was not going to take any suggestions until I knew that I wasn’t going to have the running time cut, I wasn’t going to have to cut the cast, and I wasn’t going to have to fill the show with product placement, which were the other conditions. So I didn’t really consider it at that point. As we got deeper into the show… there’s 50-something hours of Breaking Badand there’s 92 Mad Men. If we had done less, I might have been interested in it. But it’s different strokes. I am glad that it’s a piece of it’s own thing. As far as I’m concerned, seasons five, six, and seven are the sequel to Mad Men.”
We’re ultimately glad that there is no spin-off here, if for no other reason that for every “Better Call Saul,” we have four or five shows that are a little more like “Joey.” We don’t need a ton of those.
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