I don’t really want to talk about the negotiations themselves. “I don”t understand why, with all of the success of the show, they suddenly need to change it,” Weiner told Stelter, though later he said, “”I love the show I have every intention of it working out.”

And because of the delay in negotiations, the series definitely won’t return until 2012 (as I’ve been predicting for a while), probably March, and now there’s a chance things could fall apart altogether – or that AMC and Lionsgate could try to do the show without Weiner. The deal was close to being done – with Matt Weiner set to make $30 million over the next three seasons – but talks have allegedly broken down over AMC’s desire for three key changes: 1)Adding an extra two minutes of commercial time to each episode (they asked for this in the last contract extension, and instead compromised by letting each episode end at 11:02 p.m.), 2)Dropping at least two regular castmembers, and 3)More product integration in each episode. If, like me, you’ve been away from your computer for a while today, here’s the basic talking points being thrown around on various sites, starting with a report and Brian Stelter’s comprehensive New York Times piece:

I spend most of the day on airplanes, while the “Mad Men” renewal news went from slow-and-steady to apocalyptically bad, depending on what corners of the Interwebs you read.

Pieces Of You by Allison M. Cosgrove