'Mad Men' sets April premiere date

‘Mad Men’ sets April premiere date

By Martin Miller

Jan. 23, 2013 12 AM PT

April may be a little less cruel this year for “Mad Men” fans as the highly acclaimed period drama is set to return for its sixth season Sunday, April 7.

Creator and executive producer Matt Weiner made the announcement to a handful of journalists Tuesday afternoon with the information embargoed until Wednesday morning.

Fans looking for hints about where the AMC show’s penultimate 13 episodes may be headed will be disappointed, however. Weiner, who said he was in the middle of writing this season’s eighth episode, was characteristically tight-lipped about details.

PHOTOS: On the set of “Mad Men”

“I’m not really prepared to talk about the new season specifically right now,” he said. “The show will be advancing in time. I can’t say how much. It will be more than a week.”

But the show runner of the four-time Emmy winner for best drama still had plenty to add.

“We ended up with a story this season that seems very related to what our anxieties are right now,” he said. “The show seems to tap into an internal state that is based on anxiety, a loss of national self-esteem, an alienation that has been created from technology and a turning inward from the things you can’t control to the things you can.”

The show will have a special two-hour premiere, which Wiener likened to a movie.

“It has a lot of foreshadowing,” he said. “It will answer a lot of questions of where we left off last year. I’m really very proud of its mood.”

Weiner confirmed that after this season there will only be 13 more episodes before the series ends. It’s still unclear whether those final 13 episodes will be aired consecutively or split into two parts.

AMC broke up the last 16 episodes of Vince Gilligan’s hit drama “Breaking Bad” into two abbreviated seasons. Its final eight episodes are to air this summer.

“If they split it up, I will write it like Vince did,” Weiner said. “I’m not against that.”

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