20 of Mad Men’s Famous Fans Dish on How They Want the Show to End

How many roads must a man sit beside, before you can call him a man? Photo: Courtesy of AMC/? AMC Network Entertainment LLC and Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Most theories for how Mad Men will end are bad, but some of them are less bad than others. To find out if the cultural elite have better ideas than us schmucks sitting at our keyboards, we asked a selection of Mad Men’s famous fans for their best guesses for how tonight’s finale will shake out. How do their guesses stack up to yours?

Jonathan Adler (designer)
“I want Roger and Joan to just get together and ride off into the sunset, ‘cause they’re my faves. Wouldn’t that be great, though? Everybody else I’m like, whatevs.�

Geoffrey Arend (actor, (500) Days of Summer — and husband to Christina Hendricks)
“You know the man falling off the building? I just want somebody to fall off the building. That’s a simple way of ending it, because we’ve seen that so many times. As a geek, I’d be like, ‘Yeah! I knew it! I knew that was portending a fortune!’ It doesn’t have to be Don Draper. Make it a surprise.�

Rose Byrne (actress, Spy)
“Maybe they’ll go into a time machine, and they’ll go forward a hundred years.�

Mario Cantone (comedian)
“I’d like to see Don be, hopefully, a little happy. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I know they wouldn’t be, like, HE’S HAPPY! But, like, something, a glimmer of hope that he may end up okay.�

Anna Chlumsky (actress, Veep)
“It’s really bad, but I would love for Don Draper to be really unhappy.�

Patricia Clarkson (actress, Parks and Recreation)
“Somebody’s going to die.� 

Ophira Eisenberg (host, “Ask Me Another�)
“I just interviewed Matthew Weiner! He sort of intimated that these characters’ lives move along. It’s not like the end will be some catastrophic event; it will make sense in terms of the entire series. So I like the idea of an ending where we feel like we trailed off, and there could be another episode, but it’s the end. It makes it hard. I don’t want everyone to die.�

Cuba Gooding Jr. (actor, American Crime Story)
“I don’t know. I want to see Joan find love again. That’s kind of sad, that whole thing. And Don’s gotta find redemption in his life somehow. He’ll get another apartment. Or die of a heart attack. The way he’s drinking and carrying on, who knows?�

Glenn Frey (musician)
“Slowly.� 

Douglas Hodge (actor, Penny Dreadful)
“I’d probably just keep it going on until it got to the 2000s, and there’d be people living in cardboard boxes.�

Natasha Lyonne (actress, Orange Is the New Black)
�Anything that doesn’t involve the internet. It’s just so nice. Remember?� 

Jay Manuel (makeup artist)
“I’m one of those people that I get really upset when they try and make all of the story lines nice and simple and clean because they feel like the fans want that clean ending. I’d love to see the tension still there.� 

Ross Matthews (host, Live from E!)
“Here’s what I don’t want, I hope he doesn’t jump out of a window. My issue is that this ending is too perfect. It wraps everything up in a neat little bow. That show is not about having perfect bookends. On Mad Men, life gets complicated and messy. I want to be surprised. I’m really hoping the ending is something that I’ve never even thought about.�

Isaac Mizrahi (designer)
“If Don Draper went gay it would be amazing. That’s what I’m praying will happen. And when he does can he please call ME? Seriously, after all that womanizing he finally realizes he’s in love with ME or something. I can see it happening.�

Kelly McCreary (actress, Grey’s Anatomy)
“I recently read this really great almost fan-fiction series that I kind of want to see pan out that it turns out that Don Draper is actually this real guy  [D.B. Cooper] who hijacked a plane to Las Vegas and then jumped out of it with $200,000 — I want to see that happen.� [Editor’s note: The plane was actually going to Seattle.] 

Ronald D. Moore (executive producer, Outlander)
“I don’t want to redeem them. I don’t want to kill them. I have to say, I’m probably one of the few people who really liked the Sopranos ending, because it just stopped the story, and I kind of felt like their lives went on in some way, and it sort of kept the show alive in my head. It’s not that I want them to replicate that, because it was singular, but I don’t want a conclusion.�

Chris Noth (actor, The Good Wife)
“He’s knocking on the door of his ex-wife, and she opens the door, and they look at each other. Curtain.�

Andrew Rannells (actor, Girls)
“I want to flash forward and see how Sally ends up when she’s an adult. What is she doing? Where is she today? Drinking, probably.�

Timothy Simons (actor, Veep)
“I feel like people are going to want fireworks, and I just don’t know that it has ever been the show that has been about fireworks. So even though I would want that, I don’t think it is going to end that way.�

Snoop Dogg (musician)
“They should call me up; let me get in on the season finale.�