Mad Men Could Have Easily Ended After Just One Season

"The Wheel" is a superb episode that encapsulates Don's existential crisis. Don spends most of the episode consumed with creating a campaign for Kodak's slide projector. He tells his wife Betty that he will not be able to join her in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving, despite her need to celebrate as a family. During his transcendent pitch for "The Carousel," Don lovingly gazes at nostalgic pictures of his family on the projector screen: Sally and Bobby as babies, kissing Betty on New Year's Eve, and their wedding. These are the perfect, wholesome images of the suburban nuclear family he never had growing up but always dreamed of.

"This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved," Don poignantly monologues to tearful executives. Don frequently uses his advertising campaigns to work out his inner feelings, and his speech makes him realize that the place where he is loved is his home in Ossining. He returns and announces to his beautiful wife that he will be joining them for Thanksgiving, scooping up Bobby and Sally in celebration. 

But then Weiner pulls the rug out from under us, revealing that Don is really alone in the big, empty house. He sits on the stairs in the darkness to Bob Dylan's somber tune "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," isolated before the quintessential holiday about family and togetherness. Don consistently self-sabotages his familial relationships because of his childhood traumas; he cannot allow himself to truly love and be loved because he never experienced it growing up. 

Former AMC Senior VP Christina Wayne reveals to The Hollywood Reporter that the melancholy scene did not always end this way: 

"[Weiner had] written it that Don comes home, hugs Betty, and they drive off into the sunset. But that ties the show up with a bow, and we had to do season two. He got so mad he hung up, but he called back and said: 'You're right. I just love my characters so much, I wanted them to be happy.'"

For the rest of the series, Matthew Weiner was notorious for ending episodes ambiguously with many loose ends.