Mad Men and TV Finales: how important is the perfect ending?

The critically acclaimed AMC Mad Men series comes to end after 8 years this weekend. Hollywood insiders David Shore, creator and executive producer of House, Melissa Bernstein, co-executive producer of Breaking Bad, and Chuck Tatham, producer of How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family, discuss the importance of ending on the right note and the lengths producers will go to keep their big endings under wraps.

The Mad Men finale is tomorrow night. How do you think Matt Weiner will be sleeping tonight?

Melissa Bernstein: (Laughs) Probably not well. He's probably not going to sleep soundly until the show is out there for the world to enjoy.

What's at stake for Matt Weiner and his team when Mad Men goes to air tomorrow night? 

Chuck Tatham: I don't know if there's that much at stake for Matt because he's a billionaire. But I think the fact of matter is there are millions of people who worship the show. It's like a public trust at this point and if they screw up, and I know they won't, but if they were to screw up there would be hell to pay. But the show was so consistently fantastic I have no fear. 

How do you think they'll know that they've pulled it off? What will be the sign that they were successful?

David Shore: There's this weird bubble you get into when you finish a show. He probably finished it months ago and he either feels good about it, or it feels uncertain about it, and I suspect he feels good about it. When you're actually working on a show, the actual air dates almost become irrelevant. You work to the deadline of delivering it to whatever network you're on and then your job is done. 

But one single tweet could up-end all of that. 

CT: I'm working on it! (laughs)

DS: Yes that is true. He feels good about it I think and he's going to sleep well tonight confident that he will have millions of people tell him how much they loved it. Then he will read the odd tweet from the odd disgruntled fan because it is a public trust and people feel ownership of your damn show. 

A lot of people see Breaking Bad as the textbook example of a show that ended well. What were the buttons that you pushed that made it work for viewers? 

MB: Well I think all the credit belongs to Vince Gilligan, of course, who is the architect of that show. And he honestly delights in tying up loose ends, in paying off story beats, in paying off a very subtle character details. That makes him happy. So he couldn't wait to do that for the audience. And I think it really came from the creative approach to the show. As producers it becomes our job to protect and preserve those reveals, but the hard work is done by the writers.

Chuck, the whole premise of How I Met Your Mother was based on the ending of the show, which was a big reveal. And the team actually had to shoot scenes with young actors for the finale years before it aired. How did you keep those kids quiet for all those years?

CT: I think there may have been some medication. (laughs) When I joined the show in season 4, someone took me aside and said, "You know we've already kind of shot the ending." It was just the interview with the kids because the kids have to look like kids for the rest of time and the kids were growing up. I don't know how they kept themselves quiet, they did a great job, and all the writers signed a confidentiality agreement, and we somehow got through it to the end. I know that the last few weeks when people are asking me, I made sure I hadn't had more than two cocktails because Lord knows what I would have divulged.

But you knew what the ending was all along?

CT: I knew what the ending was, I didn't know exactly how we would arrive there. Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the guys who created the show, they had it in mind, I think, almost from the day they pitched it at CBS, like 9 years earlier. So we were hurtling towards a defined place for over 6 years. 

Melissa, t seems like that the people of Breaking Bad wrote the book on how to keep the ending of that show secret. I know there were a number of different things that you did, but can you run through a couple of them for us? 

MB: Well that's very kind of you to say, I think they're kind of making it up as we went along, trying to gather some of the best practices from other shows and different studios. We just took a look at all of our routine practices; the things we do every day as part of a production, and just try to think through, what if something went wrong? So we limited our distribution list for our scripts, for our dailies, for our episodes. We redacted scripts so that if there was any sensitive material, we took that out of the scripts. Everything was watermarked, our call sheets were watermarked, our asides were watermarked, and even just the descriptions on the call sheets of the scenes were written in almost haiku form.

Did you put a secret file in the computer so that if you were hacked it wouldn't be revealed?

MB: Our whole post production section of the of the production cycle had a secret code name so that if anybody got into our dailies area, or into where episodes are stored, they wouldn't know that they were Breaking Bad. 

DS: The last two scenes of our finale of House didn't go to everybody. We did not give it to the network, we did not give it to the studio.

MB: No-one?

DS: We had the people who needed to see it from the network and the studio come to my office and read it there. The actors involved with those scenes obviously saw those pages, and the director saw it, but that was it.

CT: We had a fake script, with a fake ending. We circulated it so that 83% of it was accurate, but the end was not.

MB: Who did you circulate that to?

DS: Everybody who'd signed a release, and they were all watermarked. But even beyond that, we wanted to keep it secret. 

There was a funeral scene in the finale of House that was pretty key to the story, but how do you shoot a scene like that with a room full of extras?

DS: The funeral scene has a big picture of the dead guy up at the front and we don't want the world to know who the dead guy is, with all those extras in there, so the big picture at the front of the room, if you were in that room when we were filming it, was a big blue piece of cardboard. And then afterwards we added the photo.

There's so much speculation over what's going to happen to Don Draper. Melissa, some people are saying that maybe he'll turn out to be the hijacker D.B. Cooper. And apparently Mr. Weiner has said that's not going to happen, but what was your your favourite theory around Breaking Bad from the stuff that was circulating that turned out not to be true?

MB: For Breaking Bad, I feel like not many people wanted to ponder Walter White's end. They just wanted to think of the victorious, glorious ways that he might shoulder on. I always just smiled and I just tried to stay focused on what we're actually doing. 

Chuck, did you follow the speculation around How I Met Your Mother? 

CT: Sort of. It was kind of ridiculous and crazy. I know that as the end approached, Carter and Craig knew they had this powder keg and they were on the Internet. I actually went to McGee's, the bar in New York that McLaren's is based on in the show, and I was there for the finale with about 900 How I Met Your Mother fans. And it was a lot of fun when the audience found out that the mother was no more. One of the writers in the back, who shall remain nameless, he's a real troublemaker, he yelled "What the hell?" and then the place erupted. I dodged a couple of flying chairs. Until then I was getting free drinks, but the Internet just blew up that night, it just blew up. For the first time in all my years on the show, I got a sort of a sense of how these people are utterly devoted and committed to the show. I think some of them were desperately bereft. But before it got really ugly I found myself a taxi cab and got the hell out of there. 

People have real attachments to these characters, I'm sure that was absolutely true of House as well, David. As it neared the ending, how intense was the reaction from fans? 

DS: Chuck mentioned it. They feel this ownership sense and that's wonderful, but boy it's disconcerting because if you do anything that they don't approve of, that they don't agree with, that isn't the way they want to take it... and look I'm biting the hand that feeds me just saying this. They really resented that Lisa Edelstein was not in the finale. They really resented that she wasn't in season 8. And then there are others who resent that House and Wilson didn't get together. And then there are others that wanted to go way back to House and Cameron. It's those relationships that they really latch on to. They want your characters to be happy, and that's wonderful, but not particularly dramatic sometimes. 

I guess there's still a chance that between now, when we're speaking, and when the Mad Men finale airs tomorrow night that some huge plot detail will get leaked. Melissa, Breaking Bad pulled it off, but how much would have been lost if the ending had leaked to people? 

MB: I hope not that much. I think the journey is the destination and it's all about how you arrive at your end, not the end itself. We had a show that started out with a cancer diagnosis, so I don't think there was a mystery about how that would conclude at some point. But how Walter White goes out is really the question, I think.

DS: The majority of people out there still are not getting their news from Twitter. The majority of the viewers are watching it without seeing that, so it might spoil something. Although there are studies lately that say people want to have spoilers.

MB: And there are people who will seek them out, and I think there are people who will stay out of that loop as far as they can. 

But is a surprise ending a key to wrapping up a series? Can that be part of the pleasure that people get, if they get pleasure out of the ending?

DS: The challenge, and this applies to the episodes as well as the series, the challenge is to surprise people that are expecting to be surprised. And after that surprise for them to go, "Oh yeah, that makes complete sense." So ultimately, it's a surprise that shouldn't have surprised, in a weird way. It has to be a natural development from what they've been experiencing.

MB: And it's about satisfying your audience over surprising them. 

CT: The one thing we talked about a lot also, was the end of this series, that final episode, is going to be different, but it should feel in many respects like an episode. The loyal fan doesn't want something weird coming out of left field.

MB: And staying true to the characters.

DS: I actually resent this radio program we're on! (laughs) I actually do. I resent the attention that gets attached to the ending of a show, that there's an series getting judged based on that final hour.

But in some cases, like when you look at the Sopranos or Lost, the final episode meant a lot in terms of what the entire series added up to.

DS: It actually made sense with Breaking Bad. That that was one story. The Sopranos wasn't, How I Met Your Mother, even though it's got that illusion of it, it really wasn't. And House wasn't.

It seems like the whole idea of coming up with endings is something that we started with with Mary Tyler Moore and M*A*S*H*, because before that shows just went off the air. Star Trek never had an ending...

DS: But yes, and I that's what I expected when I started on the show. If somebody asked me "Do you have an ending?" and I went "It's going to end when I will be in my office and I'll get a phone call from the boss calling to tell me that I'm off the air. That will be the end of the show." But I fully expected that - that we will just continue to tell episodic stories. Cable has changed though. Network is still largely that, not completely. Whereas Breaking Bad was one big long story. 

MB: I think Vince actually impacted pitches by going in and taking Mr Chips and turning him into Scarface, and knowing in a very macro sense where he wanted it to go. 

CT: We have it written in large letters at Modern Family, "Endings make stories." It's on the main board. And when you start pitching someone else will say "How does it end?" and then you usually just have to leave, because you have no idea.

DS: Endings don't make series, endings make episodes. Although Damon has apparently ruined Lost for everyone...

Will the ending of Mad Men the significant TV event?

DS: I would submit no. I would submit, that even if it's great, the show is not defined by that ending.

Chuck, as a fan of the series, what are you hoping for tomorrow night?  

CT: Honestly, I am hopelessly devoted to the show. I don't want it to be weird. I don't want to be a fantasy, or a dream, or something like that. I can't imagine it will be because heretofore those guys have really had their act together. I'm devoted to the show and I'm in capable hands. I'll be there in my my Montreal Canadiens pajamas just hoping and enjoying it with everybody else. 

Melissa, what's the most pleasurable possible ending for you?

MB: It's a great question, but I just want to give myself over to Matt Weiner and let him show me the way.