Matthew Weiner - Career

Career

Weiner began his screenwriting career writing for the short-lived Fox sitcom Party Girl (1996). He was a writer and producer on The Naked Truth and Andy Richter Controls the Universe. Weiner wrote the pilot of Mad Men in 1999 as a spec script while working as a writer on Becker. The Sopranos creator and executive producer David Chase offered Weiner a job as a writer for the series after being impressed by the script.

Weiner served as a supervising producer for the fifth season of The Sopranos (2004), a co-executive producer for the first part of the sixth season (2006), and an executive producer for the second part of the sixth season (2007). He has sole or joint credit for 12 episodes overall, including the Primetime Emmy Award-nominated episodes "Unidentified Black Males" (co-written with Terence Winter) and "Kennedy and Heidi" (co-written with David Chase). He received two Primetime Emmy Awards as a producer of The Sopranos — one for the show's fifth season in 2004 and one for the second part of the show's sixth season in 2007.

In addition to writing and producing, he acted in two episodes, "Two Tonys" and "Stage 5" as fictional mafia expert Manny Safier, author of The Wise Guide to Wise Guys, on TV news broadcasts within the show.

Weiner also spent the hiatus between the two seasons teaching at his alma mater, the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television (now School of Cinematic Arts), where he taught an undergraduate screenwriting class on Feature Rewriting during the Fall 2004 semester.

After The Sopranos concluded in 2007, Weiner began looking for a network to produce Mad Men. Both HBO and Showtime passed on the project. HBO offered to produce the series if Chase would be on board as a writer or producer, but Chase instead chose to focus on developing feature films. Weiner eventually pitched the series to AMC, which had never produced an original dramatic television series. They picked up the show, ordering a full 13-episode season. Weiner has served as showrunner, an executive producer, and head writer of Mad Men throughout its five seasons, each consisting of 13 episodes. As the showrunner he has had a major role in the writing and directing of each episode, also approving actors, costumes, hairstyles, and props. He is credited with writing or co-writing seven episodes of the first season, eleven episodes of the second, twelve episodes of the third, ten of the fourth, and nine of the fifth. He has also directed all five season finales.

Mad Men has received considerable critical acclaim and has won four Golden Globe Awards and fifteen Primetime Emmy Awards. It is the first basic cable series to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, winning the award in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Weiner won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for the pilot episode, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", in 2008, as well as being nominated for "The Wheel" (with Robin Veith). He also won Primetime Emmys for the same category in 2009, for "Meditations in an Emergency" (shared with Kater Gordon), and in 2010, for "Shut the Door. Have a Seat" (shared with Erin Levy). In 2009, he was also nominated for "A Night to Remember" (with Veith), "Six Month Leave" (with Andre Jacquemetton & Maria Jacquemetton), and "The Jet Set"; he was also nominated in 2010 for "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency" (with Veith). In 2011, he was nominated for "The Suitcase". Most recently, in 2012, he was nominated for "Far Away Places" and "The Other Woman", both with Semi Chellas.

Weiner and his writing staff also won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series and were nominated for the award Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony for their work on the first season. They were nominated for the WGA award for Best Dramatic Series a second time at the February 2009 ceremony for their work on the second season. Weiner and the writing staff won the WGA Award for Best Drama Series (after being nominated for the third consecutive year) at the February 2010 ceremony for their work on the third season. Weiner was also twice nominated for the WGA award for episodic drama at the February 2010 ceremony for his work on "The Grown-Ups" (with co-writer Brett Johnson) and "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency" (with Robin Veith).

Weiner's first feature film, You Are Here, is in production as of July 2012.