Read the Best (Fake) 'Mad Men' Oral History Ever Written

Earlier this year, The Hollywood Reporter ran an epic oral history about AMC’s groundbreaking drama Mad Men as the series prepared to launch its final run of episodes. As insightful as that behind-the-scenes account was, there’s an even more comprehensive retrospective online right now, one that features revelations you’ve never heard anywhere else. For example, did you know that Matthew Weiner wrote all seven seasons of Mad Men in four hours way back in 2006 after being terminated by The Sopranos for pitching a script where the entire cast dies on a tragic roller coaster ride? Or that Vincent Kartheiser spent the entirety of the pilot ad-libbing lines about The Pete Campbell Weight-Loss Festival? Or how about the carefully-guarded secret that Weiner’s real name is actually Francis Muscles?

Related: ‘Mad Men’ Star Kiernan Shipka on Sally’s Confrontation with Don and Growing Up on Set

OK, OK… so none of this stuff is what you might call “true.” (Though we totally buy the thing about Francis Muscles.) It’s all dreamed up courtesy of the satirically-inclined minds at Clickhole, the Onion-affiliated BuzzFeed parody site. True or not, the article is a fantastic bit of mimicry, replicating the layout and tone of most oral histories, just ramping the ridiculousness up to 11. We’ve highlighted a few choice excerpts from the article below, but you should really click over to Clickhole to read the full thing for yourself.

Matthew Weiner: To this day, I believe we assembled the perfect cast for that show. Every actor on Mad Men is terrible, but that’s only because there are no good actors in the world. I think we got the least bad actors who exist.

Vincent Kartheiser: People say I started ad-libbing those lines about The Pete Campbell Weight-Loss Festival because I hadn’t memorized the script. That’s not true. I had memorized the script. I just hated the script. I believed in The Pete Campbell Weight-Loss Festival. I still think it could work.

Matthew Weiner: It definitely became this thing in the culture that I never could have anticipated. I recently got a letter from a woman that said, “I gave birth to identical triplets yesterday and named all three of them Don Draper. Those are their names because your show is so good.” I never thought Mad Men would have that kind of impact on people’s lives.

Jon Hamm: I am Hamm. Mad Men is about being the secret man who drinks at work. It is about watching a man explode and then saying, “I am that man who just exploded. Give me his trophies.”

Christina Hendricks: To me, Mad Men is about a group of men and women who work in advertising in the 1960s and run into various problems.

Mad Men airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on AMC.