Sunday night’s Mad Men episode was the next-to-last in the series’ acclaimed run. But it was also the last time we ever had to sit through a Next Week on ‘Mad Men’ segment. Since creator Matthew Weiner’s clever cutting of these segments might go unnoticed by some, Seth Meyers paid tribute to them on Late Night Monday night.
The Next Week segments are always frustratingly ambiguous, often only including non-sequiturs that have nothing to do with the plot. There’s clips of characters asking what they want for lunch or announcing what they’re wearing. Shots of them lighting cigarettes or slamming down phones (no one can angrily slam a phone like Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell). Again, these scenes don’t tell the audience anything about the plot, other than revealing what character will be in the following week’s episode.
The Next Week on ‘Mad Men’ segments are so well known that Weiner was asked about them in a 2013 NPR interview. He admitted that it was something he stole from The Sopranos. He even suggested that these trailers were stories within themselves.
“It was harder to find out back then, and you'd watch these trailers that were really very deceptive on The Sopranos,” Weiner said in 2013. “They'd show an explosion, but you didn't know what it was. So I asked them to start constructing stories like that. And they're very hard to do — and, more importantly ... it is my belief that the audience's relationship with the show and their desire to come back and watch it the next week happens in those moments as the credits are rolling, and they're listening to that music and thinking about the episode.”
Meyers put together a “best-of” reel with scenes that would be included in the Next Week segments.
Mad Men’s series finale airs this Sunday.