Currently nominated for 16 Emmys and the winner of last year's award for outstanding drama series, "Mad Men" -- which begins its third season Sunday night on AMC -- isn't basic cable's first prestige show.
There is "Rescue Me," for instance, which recently finished its fifth season. But it has come to stand for the good work that can be done there. And like "Rescue Me," it is more intense for having to be a little circumspect about things that premium cable delights in making explicit -- a strategy that appropriately reflects its themes and the more conservative time in which it's set.
The new season opens with a pair of naked feet in the light of an open refrigerator; they belong to Don Draper (Jon Hamm), our deeply flawed but physically immaculate ad-man hero, warming milk in the middle of the night for his equally splendid pregnant wife (January Jones).
As when "Lost" returns, we begin the new run of "Mad Men" wondering exactly when we are. The progress of Betty Draper's pregnancy, announced at last season's end, argues for late spring 1963, but there are no overt historical references to nail it down, and the episode feels, by "Mad Men" standards, relatively timeless, a little dreamy. As Don heats the milk for his sleepless wife, he sees visions of his own complicated genesis.
Shows such as this are sometimes called "cinematic" because there is thought given to how they look, and this is very much something to be looked at. And yet it is not like the movies at all; its language is a television language, couched in the luxury of having 13 hours to tell a story -- a story that is just a volume in a longer story, now entering its 27th hour.
That nothing much seems to be happening -- and happening slowly at that, to the frustration of some viewers -- means that small moments play large; it's television as Japanese tea ceremony. Characters are built gradually through action, not declaration, and that action might stray far from what is eventually revealed as the main point. There are those who find this all precious beyond belief -- with an average of only 1.8 million viewers an episode last season, this is a series that would not survive at all on broadcast television -- but I find it quite beautiful more often than not.
