'Mad Men'

AMC's “Mad Men” begins its second season Sunday night as the proud owner of 16 Emmy nominations, including a historic, first-ever-for-basic-cable best drama nod, shared with FX's "Damages." (Male lead Jon Hamm and recurring player Robert Morse, classed as a "guest star," are the other big-ticket nominees.) It has already won a Peabody Award and a couple of Golden Globes. It was the most prestigious show of 2007 in the sense that -- like "The Sopranos" years earlier -- it was the one to mention if you wanted to sound smart about your TV watching.

It is worth the noise. Set in the world of advertising (and its suburban adjunct) at the dawn of the '60s, it was not quite like anything else on television when it appeared, with its exceedingly measured tone, its unexpected setting and the thematic interests of creator Matthew Weiner (a "Sopranos" vet), who seems to see grand things in the smallest human affairs. (CBS' "Swingtown," another show about sexual mores and identity crises in a bygone age, strikes me as having been cast in its mold -- unsuccessfully -- though that may be only coincidence.)

If the new season doesn't start with a bang, it's just the natural breathing space before things get complicated again around the offices of Sterling Cooper, where the big news is the arrival of a Xerox machine.

Genius creative director Don Draper (Hamm) has survived the discovery that he is not who he says he is -- the secret remains all but secret -- and is for the time being without a mistress or love object other than his own missus. (There is a nice feint when we first see him, taking off his shirt as if for an afternoon tryst -- but he is only at his doctor's, learning that he has all the normal afflictions of a smoking, drinking, both-ends-of-the-candle-burning midcentury Manhattan business executive.) Wife Betty (January Jones), the world's most naive former fashion model, is over what amounted to a small nervous breakdown, back in control of her portion of her husband's world.

Unknowingly pregnant secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) has gone off somewhere during the break (ostensibly a "fat farm") and returned with no baby in sight. Senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery) has come back from his heart attack and is smoking again but no longer adulterously involved with office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks). Junior account manager Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, who's almost 30 but barely looks 20), the unwitting father of Peggy's child, having failed in his attempt to extort Draper's love and approval, appears resigned to his place in the company and cautiously happy in his marriage. All this will change, of course.