A method to the 'Mad Men'

Stylish, elegant and yet somehow inert, like a neon cocktail glass from the early '60s era it's set in, "Mad Men" returns for its second season on a competitive new night at 9 Sunday on AMC.

It has already won a prestigious Peabody Award as well as a doorstop Golden Globe, and it leads all dramas in ongoing Emmy voting with 16 nominations from its heady first season last summer, when it ran on Thursdays. Yet will all that and an Entertainment Weekly cover shot translate into popular success - not to mention an Emmy in the fall?

AMC is betting it will with a budget of more than $2 million an episode for the period drama and an extensive promotional campaign that might have been spawned by the show's own Sterling-Cooper advertising agency. Yet in the grand tradition of "The Sopranos," where writer-creator Matt Weiner cut his teeth, the second season opens determined not to rush itself and, above all, not to pander.

It pulls back from last season's cliffhanger close, with Jon Hamm's Don Draper (aka Dick Whitman) seemingly separated from his family; his protege, Elisabeth Moss' Peggy Olson, giving birth to a baby; and his boss, John Slattery's Roger Sterling, suffering a pair of heart attacks, and leaps ahead a few months in time. Having suitably mourned Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential loss with a raucous election-night party, it jumps ahead to the Camelot era with Jackie Kennedy taking the nation on a TV tour of the White House (while the various characters react in various ways watching in the various places they live, in a lovely montage). It puts a lid back on the drama and lets it percolate.

This might be off-putting to newcomers who wonder what all the fuss and hype are about. To them, "Mad Men" is likely to seem heavy on atmosphere and light on actual substance. Yet there's a lot going on here, from Don Draper's hidden identity to the hidden sexuality of Bryan Batt's art director Salvatore Romano to the (for the time being) hidden ambition of Vincent Karthheiser's Pete Campbell, who attempted to blackmail Draper into a promotion last season.

For now, the tension tends to bubble up in evocative images: Draper disrobing - for a doctor; January Jones as his wife, Betty, in trim riding breeches and, later, a bustier and garters, before having to deal with a (very Freudian) broken-down automobile and a demanding mechanic; her chance meeting with a former roommate who turns out to be a "party girl."

Through it all saunters Draper, whose life is a tangled turmoil beneath the placid surface. And for all the things he can't fix in private, he has a piercing and unerring eye for what he can fix professionally.

"Sex sells," Peggy says offhandedly.

"Says who?" Don replies. "The people who talk like that think monkeys can do this. You are the product. You feel something, that's what sells," he adds. "They can't do what we do, and they hate us for it."

Think of that as an explanation for Weiner's working methods as well. He doesn't just hand the viewers the sex and melodrama they expect; instead, he works with themes, associations, connotations and waits for them to add up.

There's a danger to that approach, however. Weiner shouldn't forget that for all its subtlety "The Sopranos" could fall back on the odd mob assassination or rape or murder of passion to liven things up from time to time. For all the obvious parallels, the bloodletting in the corporate advertising world of Madison Avenue in the early '60s just doesn't pack the same wallop.

Even so, give "Mad Men" credit for believing the audience can recognize that the style is the substance, that the unrepentant smoking and drinking and sexism of the era make their own points about the undetected (or openly ignored) hypocrisies of today. All viewers will have to make up their own minds about "Mad Men." At least for now I'm buying what they're selling.