Hasta La Creative!

Matthew Weiner, resting comfortably in a brown leather armchair, shifts his weight toward a silver tray holding crystal tumblers and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He turns the bottle to hide the label. “You don’t want any brands in the shot, do you?” he asks the photographer.

Ad Age’s cover shoot — in the penthouse of Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel — and this interview mark the end of a TV series in which Mr. Weiner chronicled a period of great change, the ’60s and ’70s, through the lens of Madison Avenue. It makes sense that this master of detail is hyperaware of brands after spending the past seven years bringing “Mad Men” to life and years before that researching the real adland.

HBO surprised Mr. Weiner, a former “Sopranos” writer, by passing on the “Mad Men” pilot. Ultimately, it was AMC that was willing to take a chance on a show that didn’t look like anything else on TV. That bet invigorated the network and gave viewers a taste of an era that was “more adult and dirty and darker than you remember,” he says. “It’s not ‘Leave It To Beaver.'”

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