Veith later picked up the 1960 vs. 1962 thread again:

There really wasn't much going on in 1962 historically. When we were doing our research, we found there weren't nearly as many public events in 1962 as there were in 1960. Matt was saying that he thinks it was referred to as Camelot in part because nothing happened. It wasn't that it was such a great time, it's just that people were bored. And so, I think out of that boredom, you get a lot of tension. Because when things are that quiet, you're just for the bomb, so to speak, to come.

Here she talks about the way the staff approaches the period research. Historians take note of what Weiner says about point of view:

We have one consultant, Bob Levinson, who actually worked at [the ad agency] BBDO in the '60s, so he's sort of our real gauge. But other than that, for all of us writers, there is just a tremendous amount of research and reading that goes into it.

And it has to be very selective research, too, because one of the other precepts that Matt set up, which I think is brilliant, is that you have to look at the research through the eyes of what would our people [characters] know. I mean, so much is written about 1962 in retrospect through government documents and what was really going on. You can't use any of that, because there is no way that our people would know that. ...

And there is some fun to be had with misconceptions -- characters thinking things are one way when they weren't. And there's fun to be had because the audience does know what happened. That's the great thing about doing a period show: Everyone knows what happened, so it's just a matter of finding a very interesting way of telling our people about it."

With "The Wheel," there actually was a lot of discussion because we hadn't been picked up yet for a second season, we didn't know if this was going to be the last episode of Mad Men ever, and Matt feels and lives all of his characters, so it was a very emotional time for him -- as it was for all of us.

There was a lot of discussion over where to leave Don [lead character Don Draper]. Matt actually had the speech Don gives on nostalgia written several weeks before we actually knew what the episode was. He just sort of spouted off while we were working in the middle of another script. He said, 'Just take this down, I'm going to use this somewhere.' He just basically did the Kodak pitch. I mean, he didn't even have a product for it yet. He just wanted to talk about nostalgia, and then Josh Weldon came up with the Kodak projector, which was just brilliant.

But Matt just wanted Don to really feel the claws of his family drawing him back in. So then the debate became so what happens when he goes home. And it was a long running debate about whether he does make it home to reconnect with his family -- and how to make that a bittersweet ending. Or, does he miss it. And in the end, as you can see by the episode, we kind of did both. There were so many arguments over it, but I really love how it ended up.

 We had a lot of fun throughout the first season with images and certain shots that maybe nobody notices, but we enjoy it. Like all through Season One, there's sort of horseshoe theme if you look for it. In "5G," Don comes home with an award, and it's got a horseshoe on it. And then when he walks out of the room, it falls down, which is like a very, very bad omen. And then, of course, in Korea, the real Don Draper was killed with a toilet seat, which was in the horseshoe formation.

And then there's Don telling Rachel in his most candid moment ever, I think, about his family. And he says his father was kicked in the face by a horse. And there are specific shots like this one from pilot that's shot down from the stairs of Don walking into the house, and we use that as sort of a keystone many times through Season One and Season Two. It's actually the scene you see in "The Wheel" at the end is one of the shots from the pilot of Don walking in. So, we have a lot of fun with mirroring things like that along the way."

We try to stay away from reading the analysis because you don't want it to color your thinking. But after my first solo episode ("The New Girl"), I just couldn't help myself, and I looked at a couple of blogs. And the one that I thought was absolutely fascinating talked about a moment in the episode where Freddy Rumson comes out and plays music on the zipper of his fly.

And someone had written like two full pages of research on zippers and the specific pants that Freddy was wearing to see if he was researching a new product and whether it was a plastic zipper or a metal zipper. And I was like, 'Hey, that's just something really funny that a friend of mine does,' and I just threw it in the script. ... And there's no higher form flattery, really, if someone spent that amount of time looking into zippers, because my friend does a really funny trick, and I thought it would be appropriate to the script.

Here's thinking good wishes for Robin Veith Sunday night at the Emmys...

(Above: Mad Men production photos courtesy of AMC)