'Mad Men' Creator Matt Weiner Suggests Modern Day Ending for Series

3:34 PM PST 11/14/2011 by Michael O'Connell

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"It's 2011," he says. "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."

Courtesy of AMC

Matt Weiner has several ideas of how he'd like to end Mad Men at the conclusion of its seventh season -- the biggest of which is that he wants people to like it.

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Speaking with Grantland, the creator and showrunner says that the ideal endgame came to him while producing the recent fourth season.

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"Do I know everything that's gonna happen?" says Weiner. "No, I don't. But I just want it to be entertaining and I want people to remember it fondly and not think it ended in a fart."

And one proposed non-fart ending would bring the series out of its time period and into the present day.

"I always felt like it would be the experience of human life," he says. "And human life has a destination. It doesn't mean Don's (Jon Hamm) gonna die. What I'm looking for, and how I hope to end the show, is like ... It's 2011. 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."

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Weiner compared the trajectory of the show to the Beatles album Abbey Road, with its appropriately literal final track, "The End."

"There is a culmination of an experience of people working at their highest level," he says. "And all I want to do is not wear out the welcome."

The fifth season of Mad Men, currently in production, will premiere on AMC in early 2012.