The gorgeous Golden Globe-winning drama returns for another season armed with accolades and a big-budget marketing campaign. But can the cult hit sell itself to new viewers?

The workday has begun at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, yet the offices are unusually quiet. It’s early May on the downtown Los Angeles soundstage that houses the Mad Men sets, and right now there are no clattering typewriters, ringing phones, or hushed voices sharing juicy gossip. Save for lighter moments in between takes — like when actor Jon Hamm grins naughtily as he tosses his fedora across the room at show creator Matthew Weiner, and misses — the atmosphere is dead serious. As cameras begin rolling, a dozen or so Sterling Cooper employees, including the ambitious junior exec Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), are huddled around a secretary’s desk, hanging on to every word coming from her transistor radio. They listen to the breaking news: A plane departing from New York’s Idlewild Airport has crashed in Long Island. Nearly a hundred people are dead. When bosses Don Draper (Hamm) and Roger Sterling (John Slattery) join the stunned staffers, Don immediately orders his team to halt production on their new campaign for Mohawk Airlines. ”The rest of you,” he commands, all stern composure, ”stop crying and figure out how we’re going to hit the ground running in three weeks with new work.”

There’s a brief moment of silence, but then the sharp-dressed and sharper-tongued admen just can’t help themselves. ”We might want to avoid the phrase ‘hit the ground running,”’ snickers Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis). Counters Pete: ”Apparently, some of the passengers were on their way to a golf tournament. The minute the plane hit, the bay turned plaid.” The office erupts in laughter.

Wildly inappropriate chatter in the workplace? It’s just another day on the job for the characters of Mad Men, AMC’s critically beloved series set during the 1960s golden age of Madison Avenue. The show depicts the boardroom and bedroom exploits of a group of ad execs, Brylcreemed alpha males who chain-smoke and scotch-swill their way through business hours. They dream up sly slogans for tobacco companies, proposition their secretaries, and slip out during lunch to rendezvous with their mistresses. Meanwhile, at home, their lonely wives strive for June Cleaver domestic perfection. When the show premiered last summer, reviewers drooled over its stylish look — is it time to bring back fedoras and conical bras? — and praised its dark, often devastating examinations of office politics, suburban alienation, and America’s evolving transformation from the staid ’50s to the psychedelic ’60s. Comparisons to The Sopranos were inevitable, as creator Weiner was also a writer and exec producer on HBO’s Mafia masterpiece. The first season won a Golden Globe for best drama, while the 37-year-old Hamm took home a best-actor Globe for his work as the dashing Draper. ”We knew some people were watching and liked it,” says Hamm, sitting in the lunch tent, where he’s enjoying a manly, Don Draper-ish meal of rib-eye steak, broccoli, and macaroni and cheese. (No scotch, sorry.) ”But to get the actual validation of ‘We think you’re the best’ is amazing — and totally unexpected.”

Despite the accolades, ratings hovered only around a modest 900,000 viewers. (To compare, The Sopranos averaged 3.5 million during its freshman season.) Now, with season 2 scheduled to debut July 27, the question is: Can Mad Men build on those first-year numbers and transition from critical darling to mainstream hit? ”It was nice to fly under the radar [in the beginning], but I want to reach a huge audience,” says Weiner. ”It’s AMC’s job to find those people. And they’re finding them.” Indeed, for season 2 the cable network is preparing its biggest marketing campaign ever, budgeted at $25 million. It’s all part of AMC’s objective to transform itself into a destination for quality TV shows that complement its core product: classic American movies. ”Mad Men was our first original series, and it proved that we can introduce high-end, cinematic television,” says AMC general manager Charlie Collier. (The channel has since debuted quirky dark comedy Breaking Bad and has several other shows in development, including the psychological thriller Riverview Towers from Darren Aronofsky.) For Mad Men’s second season, Collier promises to have ”every piece of marketing behind it…. This is Matt’s passion project, and we’re there to support and build it.”

The Mad Men team is feeling the burden of expectations, describing the first days back at work with words like intimidating, scary, and nerve-racking. ”We’ve had the bar set so high,” says January Jones, 30, who plays Don’s dutiful wife, Betty. ”I’d hate to be that show that won the Golden Globe and just sort of petered out.”

Rather than picking up right where last year’s finale left off — with Don alone and estranged from his family on Thanksgiving 1960, wife Betty on the verge of a nervous breakdown, nemesis Pete drowning his marital and professional sorrows in booze, and recently promoted secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) giving birth to a baby she had no idea she was carrying — the new season jumps forward in time a bit, but not so far into the future that fans won’t recognize the show. ”No Mylar suits, no muttonchops yet,” laughs Weiner, 42. ”It’s enough of a period of time that people will wonder what happened in between.” Adds Hamm: ”All the conflict that happened last season — everybody’s been sitting with that and trying not to act on it, so that pressure is building up.”

The simmering tension will include last season’s bombshell of a story line about Don’s true identity: The guy born Dick Whitman stole a dead man’s name during the Korean War and reinvented himself as Donald Draper. (When Pete uncovered this secret, he unsuccessfully tried to blackmail his boss into promoting him.) ”Here’s the issue: Don Draper’s doing great. Dick Whitman, not so,” Weiner explains. ”And we shouldn’t stop worrying about Don being discovered. His wife doesn’t know. Will she find out? Does it matter? There’s also this whole chunk of his life that we don’t know about.” If last year’s arc showed Betty slowly becoming angry — at Don’s infidelities, at being imprisoned in the gilded cage of housewifery — this season ”her energy’s going in different places,” Weiner says. But he warns, ”Don’t expect to see her holding a picket sign and burning her bra.” Recovered from his two heart attacks, Don’s mentor Roger is back full-time. As for Peggy, she will excel in her new position of junior copywriter. (Inquiring fans still want to know: How could Peggy have been unaware she was with child until delivery? Answers Weiner, ”People say, ‘Peggy’s so smart!’ But the truth is she’s 20 years old. She knew and denied it. She put it out of her mind.”) Pete keeps trying to climb the corporate ladder, but whether or not he knows he’s the father of Peggy’s baby is a question that no one is willing to answer. ”I cannot say,” Moss, 25, says with an apologetic giggle. ”If I did, I’d be dragged out of here by my ponytail!” Kartheiser, 29, is no help either, offering only a mock-incredulous response: ”I can’t believe you’re actually coming to our set and trying to get juice out of us.”

The subject of Peggy — and the fate of her baby — became the show’s most fiercely guarded secret after spoilers found their way onto the Internet in April. ”At our second table read, Matt really laid into everyone,” says Christina Hendricks, 30, whose Joan Holloway is the haughty queen bee of the Sterling Cooper steno pool. ”He was like, ‘Do not tell your friends! Do not tell your boyfriends! Do not tell your agents!’ He put the fear of God in us.” Clearly, Weiner has taken a lesson from The Sopranos creator David Chase in adopting the art of plotline omertà. At the briefest mention of the leak, the Mad Men boss launches into a tirade. ”I can’t believe that anyone could truly love the show and tell someone else what happens on it. That’s what kills me,” he says, shaking his head. ”They are ruining the show that they love. Why do people want to know the story? Why can’t they just sit back and be entertained?”

It’s easy to understand why Weiner is so protective of his show. He oversees every last detail, from writing or co-writing more than half of this season’s 13 scripts to working closely with a team of researchers who ensure period accuracy on all fronts. (Producers have stacks of Sears catalogs and Better Homes and Gardens issues from 1955 to 1962 to call on for inspiration.) When he walks a reporter through the various Mad Men sets, Weiner proudly points out the Drapers’ new living-room collection, which combines colonial revival and mid-century modern: ”Betty wanted a change,” he notes. If his vision is exacting, it’s probably because he’s been living in the Mad Men universe for nearly 10 years now. Weiner started working on the pilot in 1999, when his day job as a staff writer on the Ted Danson sitcom Becker left him yearning for a more fulfilling gig. He had always been fascinated by America in the late ’50s/early ’60s, a period filled with optimism, prosperity, and brewing social change. Nothing seemed to encapsulate all of those themes better than the go-go world of 1960s Madison Avenue.

The pilot script caught the eye of Chase, who was so impressed he hired Weiner to join the Sopranos writing staff. In 2002, Chase himself submitted the pilot script to the network on Weiner’s behalf. Yet HBO passed. As did Showtime. AMC, however, snatched up the project, putting up a $3 million-plus budget for the pilot (subsequent episodes cost $2 to 2.5 million). For his part, Weiner claims he has no bad blood with HBO, and he insists he doesn’t feel ”restricted in any way” by being on basic versus pay cable. ”I can’t swear and I can’t show nudity. But I don’t think anyone watches the show and goes, ‘Why aren’t they swearing?”’ he says. ”The sex is done in a way that tells the story. It’s not fake. We get to tell stories about adults. And that’s been amazing.”

Everyone, it seems, shares Weiner’s enthusiasm for the job, which makes the Mad Men set a remarkably cheery place. A recent visit saw the cast’s resident imp, Kartheiser, flinging off a wingtip and leaping clownishly around the room before heading to the lunch tent. And Robert Morse, the 77-year-old Emmy winner who plays Sterling Cooper’s eccentric, Ayn Rand-obsessed patriarch, Bertram Cooper, was spotted happily hanging out on set — on his day off. When the 16-hour workday stretches past midnight — as often happens — no one complains. Moss, who spent much of the first season swathed in increasingly bulky pregnancy padding and prosthetics, has even learned to embrace the constricting girdles of Peggy’s wardrobe. ”When they brought that thing to me this year, I was like, ‘Put it on! Make it as tight as you can make it! Cinch it up!”’ she says with a laugh. By now, the cast has also developed a healthy sense of humor when it comes to the offensive — and period-accurate — dialogue they regularly have to endure (as when Aaron Staton’s Ken Cosgrove called a heavier Peggy ”a piece of fruit that went real bad real fast and no one ever got to eat it”). ”We know it’s a good script when we do our table read and the heads lower, like, five times,” says Moss. ”I definitely cringe at the sexist things the guys say. The guys cringe too.”

True, it’s been only two weeks since production resumed, so there’s still plenty of time for the team to get jaded. But for now, the gratitude feels genuine — especially since, with the exception of industry vet Slattery (who was absent at the end of last season to finish up a guest-starring turn as Gabrielle’s husband on Desperate Housewives), none of the main players had ever experienced breakout success before Mad Men. ”This is my fourth series and I’ve never had a second season,” says Hendricks (Kevin Hill, The Court). ”This is so exciting. I’m on the crème de la crème of television shows and I get to be this fabulous character another season.” No one, of course, has benefited more than Hamm, who, in addition to winning a Golden Globe, shot the big-budget Keanu Reeves flick The Day the Earth Stood Still during the hiatus, and now boasts that foolproof measure of Hollywood power: ”My phone calls tend to get returned a lot quicker,” he says with a smile. In person, the St. Louis native exudes the confidence of his Mad Men alter ego, but with none of the swaggering aloofness. He even tries to downplay his debonair image, pointing out Draper’s high-waisted trousers. ”Miles of zippers!” he says. ”My pants come up higher than they have since I was 9.”

After lunch, the air on the Sterling Cooper set is permeated with the marijuana-like scent of the herbal cigarettes the actors smoke in lieu of real tobacco. It’s almost the end of the day, but there’s still one last scene to shoot. Duck Phillips (Mark Moses), the new head of account services who beat Pete out of a promotion last season, has reached out to the young exec by offering him, as Weiner cryptically puts it, ”something that turns out to be bad for Don. Pete is not comfortable with it.” Looking perturbed, Pete goes to Don’s office for advice. ”It’s not a good time, Campbell!” Don growls. Poor Pete. Rejected again.

Off camera, Weiner leans in and whispers an explanation: ”It’s about fatherhood. People don’t get what they want always in life. And so they search for something to replace it — a surrogate.” Mad Men itself has acted as a surrogate of sorts for Sopranos fans still experiencing withdrawal. Can the stylish ’60s drama last as long as its mafioso cousin? ”Ideally, what you want on these shows is five years,” says Weiner. ”I was on The Sopranos as it was dragged out for more time. What David [Chase] managed to do was sense the moment at which the machinery was worn out. We finished before that happened.” But the Madison Avenue boom carried on well into the 1970s and ’80s, so who knows how many seasons Mad Men could last — right, Matt? ”Wouldn’t you be interested in seeing the show become something else?” he wonders. Like, for instance, finally seeing Don trade in his clean-shaven, slicked-back look for some muttonchops and a perm? Weiner shrugs. ”For all I know, Don might be that guy who has the same hairstyle until he dies.” We’ll drink to that.

By Missy Schwartz