#Mad men episodes full
#Mad men episodes series

Producers also began mining the “slush pile” of submitted spec scripts from outside writers and found “The Measure of a Man,” by attorney-turned-writer Melinda M.

#Mad men episodes series

As a result, the season premiere episode “The Child” was adapted from a script originally written for Star Trek: Phase II, a planned TV series that was aborted in the late 1970s. As a result of the strike’s duration, the season order was shortened from 26 episodes to 22, and with a shorter production window, the show went looking for script sources beyond the standard writers room. The 1988 Writers Guild of America strike was the longest in the organization’s history, and its long run cut into the production of a number of series, among them the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That meant a slower pace, but an awesome three-episode arc to kick off the second season. With the strike standing in the way of that, Gilligan and company threw those episodes out and took a more careful approach to bringing out Heisenberg. Those final two episodes in season 1 would have originally given us two fast-paced hours in which Walter White ( Bryan Cranston) would have very quickly become the drug kingpin known as Heisenberg. The strike did fundamentally alter the show’s overall plot progression, though. It turns out that’s only partially true, as creator Vince Gilligan has since noted that he had decided not to let Paul go by the second episode of the show. According to that version of events, Jesse Pinkman ( Aaron Paul) was originally set to be killed off by the show’s writers, but when the strike occurred and forced the show to cut its first season from nine to seven episodes, some hard thinking about the show’s structure led to the decision to keep Pinkman around. Breaking BadĪn enduring legend about Breaking Bad sprung up around the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. Numerous TV series have had to return from strike to a kind of creative reboot, from rewriting single episodes to devising entirely new finales.

(Many people have cited the 1988 strike as part of the reason for the cancellations of both Moonlighting and Kate & Allie.) Writers strikes have a major impact on TV and film production, as the most recent strike-which began on May 2, 2023-has made clear.ĭepending on the strike’s length, dozens of film and TV projects can be suspended, delayed, or even canceled, and rebounding when a strike is over isn’t exactly easy, either.

#Mad men episodes full

On March 7, 1988, the longest strike in the history of the Writers Guild of America began, and lasted a full 155 days, affecting everything from MacGyver to Tim Burton's Batman.