AMC

"I think that that scene takes place in 1963, and blackface was not removed at least from the Philadelphia police parade until 1968 or something. And that episode was so much about white people, what they're like when they're alone," Weiner explained.

"There was a lot of discussion in the writers' room too. We had a lot of new writers, who were kind of like, we can't do this," the creator said. When asked by moderator Chuck Klosterman if there were "any writers who...," Weiner immediately chimed in and said, "Like, they didn't want their names on the story? Yeah."

But, he added, he thought it was "well-established that this was part of the framework of that time and it was so clear that we were criticizing it, but we had to live through doing it to criticize it," pointing to Don and Pete's reactions during Roger's performance.