Writing Credits

This is not something that’s worth a whole lot of attention, but someone pointed out something I find interesting about the credits on Mad Men: Matt Weiner, the show’s creator and showrunner, takes a co-writing credit on most episodes. Creators normally take a lot of writing credits in the first season and then fewer as the show goes on and the writing staff gets larger, but this season has had Weiner as one of the names after “written by” on almost every episode, including last night’s Kennedy Assassination Spectacular. In many cases, when a showrunner has a co-writer credit most weeks, it means that he assigns the script to one or more staff writers, rewrites their work extensively, and then adds his name to the writing credits (presumably having written enough of the script to satisfy Writers’ Guild requirements for such a credit). It could also mean that the episodes are written in the room by several writers and that Weiner is usually one of them; I don’t know.