"Don is seemingly becoming a little bit disengaged at work," Hamm tells TV. "What happens when you have it all? What happens when you're satisfied? Maybe you lose some of that fire."
But life with Megan isn't all hearts and flowers. Look no further than Don's humiliation when Megan throws him a surprise 40th birthday party, during which she does a sexy song-and-dance better suited for the bedroom than for cocktail hour. So how does the ballad of Don and Megan go? What's up with Roger and Joan's baby (hello, little Kevin!) and why was Lane so obsessed with a photo of another man's wife? We took our burning questions to Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who also tells us why Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) are the ones to watch.
You haven't jumped years between seasons since Season 2. How did you land on picking up the story where you did?
Matthew Weiner: [It was] the baby with Joan, the first six months basically of [Don and Megan's] marriage. It just seemed like far enough in advance. I don't want to skip too much of the story. I'm always looking at how people are related to each other in the hierarchy of the business, and how Don's personal life is interacting with the business and with himself and with his family. And it just seemed like the perfect amount of time.
In Season 3, you deliberately chose 1963 for the Kennedy assassination. Were there any historical advantages this time?
Weiner: I would say the show is not a history lesson, but ... the period we're in, people can look at Wikipedia and they're not going to find anything earth-shattering in the next 12 months. Everything that they think of that happened in the '60s happened between the Kennedy assassination and Woodstock; it's sort of blurred together. And it certainly will be as it's passing in the lives of our characters. It's always about the story in the people's lives, and for me there is a shift that is starting to go on that is actually affecting these characters' lives.
The show has always touched on the Civil Rights Movement, but the premiere is bookended with scenes about race. Is that going to more of an issue this season than in years past?
Weiner: I would not say that. That event with the guys dropping the bags full of water out on the protesters really happened. It's in the newspaper; the dialogue was taken from The New York Times, and to me it was just a great symbol of how race affects these people. It's being brought into their world and it's still a joke to them. ... I will never diminish the Civil Rights Movement by acting like it was the focal point of white America. It wasn't. It's part of why they struggled so hard, and it's part of why people had to die to get things changed.
I'm never going to rewrite history and it's out of respect. I'm not going to say, "Oh, now civil rights is a big deal to these people." It's not. As you can see, this comes into their house and it's totally a practical joke. What I love is, change is happening and they can't do anything about it. They don't even know it, and that's part of the entertainment of the show.
So Don and Megan are married. I was most surprised that Don told Megan about his past as Dick Whitman, since I believed he chose Megan over Faye because she knew less about him.
Weiner: It's shocking. I'm hoping the audience is going to be like, "Oh my God, what's this show going to be about?" ... Yes, it made Faye less attractive to him once he told her who he was, but Faye was saying to him, "Deal with who you are and live as that person." And Megan said, "I don't care who you are." That's why he felt free to tell her that.
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