Mad Men Creator Matthew Weiner's Latest TV Project Dropped By FX
It looks like FX will not be making a series with "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner after all. A project by the writer-director was first announced in 2020, but The Hollywood Reporter now confirms that the show will not go forward.
The new series, which was billed as a half-hour dramedy, received backlash upon its first announcement due to a prior sexual harassment allegation made against Weiner. Little is known about the series, but it was originally set to feature Weiner as a writer, director, and executive producer. It would have been Weiner's first project since the 2018 Amazon Prime limited series "The Romanoffs."
The showrunner has faced harassment allegations
Writer Kater Gordon won an Emmy for co-writing the masterful second season finale of "Mad Men," the Cuban Missile Crisis-set episode "Meditations in An Emergency." She went on to work on the third season of the series as well, but in a 2017 interview with The Information, Gordon claimed that she stopped working in Hollywood after Weiner suggested "she owed it to him to let him see her naked." Weiner has repeatedly denied the allegation, telling Vanity Fair that he does not remember making the alleged statement.
FX CEO John Landgraf did not go into details about the scrapped project on THR's TV's Top 5 podcast, but simply stated that the project is "not moving forward." After the project was first announced, Gordon and "Mad Men" producer Marti Noxon penned a guest column for THR titled "How the TV Industry Can Better Protect Writers From the Next Toxic Showrunner." The piece serves as both a distressing look inside the shrug-it-off attitude of Hollywood and a list of concrete ways studios can avoid perpetuating a culture of workplace harassment.
"Mad Men" is one of my favorite shows of all time, but I don't mind hearing that this new series is being scrapped. Noxon, who has served as a showrunner on series like "Sharp Objects" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," tweeted at the time of the allegations that Weiner has been called "an 'emotional terrorist' who will badger, seduce and even tantrum in an attempt to get his needs met." Whether or not the canned FX project was a direct result of these claims, there are other, better "Mad Men" alums whose careers we could be cheering for instead. Excuse me while I go program a double feature of Christina Hendricks-led "The Strangers: Prey at Night" and Kiernan Shipka-starrer "The Blackcoat's Daughter."