AMC Considered MAD MEN Spinoffs For Peggy and Sally
With Breaking Bad over and Mad Men about to air its final seven episodes, AMC isn't exactly going to be the high-quality powerhouse network it was a couple of years ago. They've already picked up Better Call Saul and the still-officially-untitled Walking Dead spinoff for two seasons, and now, in an excellent new oral history of Mad Men conducted by THR, it was revealed that they also considered two potential spinoffs that centered on the characters of Peggy Olson and Sally Draper.
Lionsgate COO Sandra Stern says:
When we first started negotiating with AMC, one of the things they wanted was a spinoff. We talked about doing a contemporary one. Given the fact that [Mad Men] ends nearly 50 years ago, most of the characters would be dead. Sally was the one character young enough that you could see her 30 or 40 years later. There was a time we wanted a Peggy spinoff, too, and, a la Better Call Saul, a minor character going off to L.A. [Series creator and showrunner] Matt [Weiner] wasn't comfortable committing to a spinoff.
This was during the year-long break between seasons four and five, when Weiner was in heated negotiations with the network about whether or not he'd return to the show. (They wanted some pretty drastic changes made; he held his ground and ultimately won the battle.) If Weiner wasn't going to commit to a spinoff, I'm not sure the actors would have been involved with it. I can't imagine Elisabeth Moss continuing to play Peggy Olson without Weiner there to guide the character, because his voice was (and is) such a huge part of building her career to the point it is now. Same goes for Kiernan Shipka, although a show that picked up in modern times with an adult Sally Draper does sound like it has the makings of a compelling idea.
What do you think? Would you have watched a spinoff about Peggy Olson in Los Angeles or an adult Sally set in modern day? Mad Men returns to AMC on April 5th, 2015.