Throughout the seven seasons spread across nearly eight years, Mad Men really encaptured a lot of different raging themes in the 1960s, never ceasing to win over complete fan and viewer attention with most of its plotlines. While the television drama series created by Matthew Weiner never failed to deliver, most of its scenes were curated specifically for a reason.
Of course, there were quite a few gut-wrenching scenes in it as well, ones that left viewers wondering why what happened happened. One of these scenes included the distressing one where Christina Hendricks’ beloved character makes a rather severe decision to sleep with a client to win over a crucial contract. But Weiner has a real reason behind making the actress pull it off.
Matthew Weiner had a genuine reason for Christina Hendrick’s distressing Mad Men scene
In episode 11 of season 5—titled ‘The Other Woman’—of the TV drama masterpiece series Mad Men, things take a stunning turn when Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) asks Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) to make a personal and moral sacrifice to ensure the company lands the Jaguar account: Sleep with Herb Rennet (Gary Basaraba), head of the dealers’ association and a member of Jaguar’s selection committee, at his proposal.
While she initially refuses ferociously, Hendricks’ character eventually ends up pulling off the gut-wrenching scene by sleeping with the said client to win the contract.
And that one queasy hour of television really did depict the very theme that has dominated the drama show from the very beginning: prostitution as an analogy for the relationship between men, women, creatives, and clients—in pretty much every combination.
In an interview with Esquire, show creator Matthew Weiner confessed what had him incorporating that scene into the saga in the first place as he talked about how his continued research process for the drama was well-documented throughout the show as it expanded and rolled along. According to him, all of those ideas came to him from the constant research, “in the sense that people want to tell me an anecdote” in the form of a pattern.
Matthew Weiner claimed to have “heard many versions” of Joan’s gut-wrenching scene
Talking to Esquire, Weiner explained that while the writers and the people in the research department were responsible for how those stories turned out to be in the superhit drama series, it was the way it all fit like puzzle pieces as an anecdote that had many different versions of it that had the creator curating all of these scenes. That was also how Joan’s distressing scene came to be. Calling the research constant, Weiner said:
We have someone who’s in charge of a research department and the writers are also responsible. Honestly it’s kind of a circle because we get a lot of ideas from research. And a lot of research has come to me in the sense that people want to tell me an anecdote.
They usually form a pattern—I hear the same anecdote many, many times. Not always about the same person, but, for example, some man peeing his pants in the office, I’ve heard so many versions of it. The Joan story of her having to sleep with a client, I heard many versions of that.
With that being emphasized, it’s inevitable that the infamous scene where Joan sleeps with a client to win a contract was more than just a dramatic plot twist. As per Matthew Weiner, it was inspired by real-life anecdotes and formed part of a larger pattern of stories that explored the complex relationships between men, women, and power, all of which made the series all the more captivating.
Mad Men can currently be streamed on AMC.
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