One of last year’s most (rightfully) acclaimed series is back, as Mad Men returns for a second season this weekend. When last we left off, a lot had occurred – Roger’s heart attack, the revelations about Don’s true past, and of course the arrival of a very, very unexpected baby.

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Season 2 begins several months after Season 1 ended – more months than it seems at first. Time has moved on for the staff at Sterling Cooper, and there’s definitely a learning curve for the audience catching up with everyone and learning how the office dynamic has changed or not changed. And fans will have to learn to be a bit patient, because some of the most pressing questions they’ll have from the end of Season 1 are not immediately answered, nor in some cases addressed by the end of this first hour.

While trying to keep secrets, I will say this – New hire Duck, brought in at the end of Season 1, has found his footing at Sterling Cooper, though everyone isn’t a fan. Joan has to figure out what to do with a major new piece of equipment the company has purchased, one which we’re all now familiar with and clearly has major benefits. How Joan decides to deal with her dilemma is a very funny part of the episode. Pete in the meantime is still trying to live up to a certain ideal he believes he must with both his family and career. And Betty? Well, she’s riding horses and blissfully happy… Okay, only one of those statements is true.

As for Peggy, having risen from the rank of the secretaries, she is now entrenched in with the Mad Men, and some of the best little moments in the premiere show how these men are as crass and sexist as ever in her presence, not censoring themselves around her in the least. So is that progress or not?

The premiere of the show is a bit of a slow burn – no doubt some might feel anxious not getting answers they desperately seek on the heels of Season 1. But by moving the action forward in time, creator Matt Weiner is clearly showing that he wants to follow these people through different moments of their lives, and I have little doubt he will not ignore the plot points he so expertly set up last year.

- AMC

The cast is as wonderful as ever – Seeing Don, Peggy, Betty, Pete and everyone else is a reminder of just how excellent these actors are and how fully the embody these people, seemingly stepping right out of the era we’re watching, rather than actors simply pretending. Jon Hamm is as complicated and guarded as ever as Don, and Elizabeth Moss continues to shine as Peggy, who speaks up when she feels it’s necessary and stands back and observes when it makes the most sense to her to do so.

Mad Men is a nuanced and engrossing show – Matthew Weiner has created a fully formed world here that is visually dynamic, thoughtful and intriguing, even while it shows the negatives of these ad execs and the lives they lead.

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Fans of the incomparable “Mad Men” needn’t worry. The start of the AMC drama’s second season is as riveting and expertly written and produced as ever. No concerns of a “sophomore slump” here. While many series fall into a rut going into their second year (cough, “Desperate Housewives,” cough), this period look at advertising executives on Madison Avenue in the 1960s has retained a flair and mystery that reminds fans how this dazzling series first grabbed hold last year and wouldn’t let go.

The second season premiere airs Sunday night at 8 p.m. on the basic cable network.

In the season debut, it’s about a year later at Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, and it’s Valentine’s Day. The agency’s creative director, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his wife decide to celebrate at a posh hotel.
Meanwhile, his junior ad executives work on a new campaign for a regional midlevel airline. And the office gets a new piece of technologically advanced equipment that sparks curiosity - a new copy machine.

In the second episode, the account with the airline gets more complicated when the much larger American Airlines suffers a plane crash and considers moving its business to Sterling Cooper.

But perhaps the biggest focus is on new advertising executive Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), who was promoted at the end of last season - the first woman in the office to write ad copy - and had a baby after a tryst with executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser). Thankfully, that plot line is the show’s only soap-opera convention.

Peggy’s new role at Sterling Cooper plunges her in the middle of a boy’s club and has her fighting for respect in a sexist era.

Creator Matthew Weiner weaves all of these stories brilliantly from one scene to the next, and the characters intertwine with precision. And as in the first season, the acting continues to be top-tiered, particularly Kartheiser as the weasel executive Campbell, and John Slattery as the womanizing Roger Sterling, co-owner of the agency.

It’s a relief that “Mad Men” has come along now, after the equally brilliant “The Sopranos” ended its run on HBO (Weiner also wrote and executive produced “The Sopranos”). Both share a seriousness and air of artistry that is rare on television.

“Mad Men,” along with the wildly inventive “Breaking Bad,” has put AMC on an elite list with HBO and FX (though Showtime is trying) for creative and original programming.

So far, the series proves that the most interesting shows are sometimes tucked away in little-known networks willing to try something different.

Slattery, who plays the excessive Roger Sterling, a guy who likes women, bourbon and plenty of cigarettes, didn’t think he had to do research for his role.

“People like to do a lot of research but there wasn’t that specific skill I needed other than smoking and drinking, which I knew how to do fairly well,” he told me during a site visit last week. “It just happens to be somebody who’s dressed in these clothes and stands in this room and stays in the moment.”

I sure hope Slattery isn’t like his character too much. Last season, Sterling’s wild ways landed him in the hospital with a heart attack.

Ad geeks set your DVRs! Mad Men Season 2 starts Sunday, July 27. Everyone living outside of the US can try to bittorent the show.

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Elisabeth Moss was born October 15, 1983 and had been studying ballet since the age of five. Starting in Los Angeles, Moss continued her training at the School of American Ballet in New York before studying with Susan Farrell at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Moss is probably best known for her six year stint as the president’s daughter on NBC’s award-winning, The West Wing. She has also appeared in movies such as Ron Howard’s The Missing, alongside Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett, as well as Girl, Interrupted with Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder. Moss made her New York stage debut in 2002, as the title character in Richard Nelson’s Franny’s Way. Soon after, she received critical acclaim and a nomination for Best Actress in the 2004 Independent Spirit Award, for her lead role in the independent film, Virgin.

Peggy, played by Elisabeth Moss on Mad Men, is Don Draper’s new secretary at Sterling Cooper ad agency. A product of Miss Deaver’s Secretarial School, she is willing to do whatever it takes to be as efficient and successful as her pedigree mentor, Joan.

Jon Hamm got his start in acting as a first grader who was handpicked to play Winnie the Pooh. He received an acting scholarship at the University of Missouri in Columbia and eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue his career. He worked as a day care teacher while still in college and became a high school teacher prior to moving to Hollywood. He has been in many television shows such as Providence, The Division, What About Brian and The Unit. His film credits include Space Cowboys, Kissing Jessica Stein and We Were Soldiers.

Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm on Mad Men, is Sterling Cooper advertising agency’s embattled creative director. He is fighting to keep his controversial tobacco account from leaving the firm, at the same time struggling to handle the mounting complications in his personal life.

A rare original dramatic offering from cable’s American Movie Channel, the weekly Mad Men TV Show was the story of a major advertising agency operating from New York’s Madison Avenue in 1960. The most successful ad executive at the Sterling Cooper Agency was handsome, indefatigable Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who was not only expert at “playing the game” while servicing accounts ranging from cigarette manufacturers to political candidates, but was also an accomplished ladies’ man, frequently and shamelessly dipping deep into the agency’s all-female secretarial pool.

It was crucial for Draper to always be at the top of his professional form: there were scores of hungry young executives who were eager to topple him from his perch and become Sterling Cooper’s new top dog. The series evoked the manners and mores of the early sixties with pinpoint accuracy: the advertising business, like practically every other business, was completely male-dominated, with an overabundance of WASPs, a minimum of Jews, and virtually no other minority anywhere in sight; women were second-class citizens and sex objects, expected to be both subservient and “available”; honesty and integrity were merely words in the dictionary; and everybody drank and smoked to excess (indeed, so many cigarettes were lit up in the course of each episode that a number of TV critics were “turned off” by the show, undoubtedly preferring that historical fact be subordinated to contemporary political correctness). Others in the the cast included John Slattery as agency CEO Roger Sterling; Elisabeth Moss as wide-eyed novice secretary Peggy Olson; Christina Hendricks as wordly-wise head secretary Joan Holloway; Vincent Kartheiser as Don Draper’s sharkishly ambitious protegee Pete Campbell; and Maggie Stiff as Rachel Menken, a source of anger and confusion to the Mad Avenue Macho Males not only because she was the executive in charge of a major department store (and Jewish in the bargain!), but also because she refused to let any mere ad man tell her how to promote her business. Created by The Sopranos’ Matthew Weiner, Mad Men was unveiled by AMC on July 19, 2007.

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