Tim Goodman has his say:
How much is that worth? Mad Men is AMC's seminal hit, its tallest flag on a crowded map of cable channels. What's more, the quality of the series never lagged. It got better. It got more and more hype. It created stars. It became a pop culture phenomenon. It won Emmys. How much is that worth, AMC? Maybe someone should go count the headlines. Measure the magazine stories and compare that to the price for an ad. Count all the times the stars were on talk shows or in photographs. Do a search for how many times AMC has been mentioned since summer of 2007 and then compare that to how many times it was mentioned prior -- go back a decade if you need to. Mad Men may not be the most watched series on television or even on AMC, but it's the greatest loss-leader in the history of television. While that was happening, Weiner was under his old contract. Underpaid? Relative to the industry and his impact on it -- hell yes.
...And yet the niche channel is clearly forgetting that none of this would be possible without Mad Men. I don't begrudge Weiner anything he's asking for because in all likelihood, this is his biggest ticket. The former Sopranos writer is extremely talented and will no doubt go on to other successes. But like David Simon, the creator of The Wire who moved on to Treme, it's not about how brilliant one person is. It's about catching lightning in a bottle and cracking that bottle over the head of the culture in a way that essentially lives on in history books forever. Now that is hard to repeat. So don't begrudge Weiner whatever it is he's getting for four brilliant seasons of Mad Men.