I am – Hercules!!

SPOILERS!! Secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy is skinny again! Pete can’t make babies with his bride! Womanizing Don Draper’s suspicious wife won’t let him put the bone to her anymore!

Season two of “Mad Men” – 2007’s best new drama – picks up on Valentine’s Day 1962, almost 15 months after the last episode of season one – and two weeks before an American Airlines flight killed 95 people bound for Los Angeles in a grisly tidal-marsh crash just southeast of Manhattan. A Sterling Cooper man (Pete Campbell?), we will learn (next Sunday?), had a father on that flight, and Sterling Cooper wants the bereaved staffer to go after the airline’s account.

USA Today gives tonight’s second season premiere of “Mad Men” four stars (out of four) and says:

… You don't so much follow Mad Men as sink into it. Returning once again to the polished, slicked-back constraints of a New York advertising agency on the cusp of a massive cultural shift, the first two episodes are more focused on character, tone and atmosphere than in advancing the mechanics of the plot. It's like life itself: There are days when nothing seems to happen, and yet much is happening. …

Entertainment Weekly gives it an “A-minus” and says:

… In lesser hands, this is a dangerous game, but Mad Men always stops short of the satiric, a powerful feat. With a strange gesture or a brutal bit of dialogue, it takes its characters' careful, false fronts, and strips them clean away. …

TV Guide says:

… Crisp as a martini yet spicy as a Bloody Mary, the intoxicating Mad Men goes down smooth and gives great afterglow but also can leave you with a hangover of unease. … If the season premiere is heavier on atmosphere than plot, by the second week, stories begin to kick into full gear, and you’re caught up again in the turbulent marriages, personal secrets and caustic office politics that make Mad Men so madly, marvelously mesmerizing.

The New York Times says:

… “Mad Men” beguiles like a Christmas catalog of all the forbidden vices, especially smoking, drinking and social inequity. Yet the series is more than a period piece. It’s a sleek, hard-boiled drama with a soft, satirical core. …

The San Francisco Chronicle says:

… The first two episodes of "Mad Men" reaffirm its place in the upper echelon of television dramas. The writing is a real thing of beauty - from the aforementioned nuance to searing workplace witticisms and pitch-perfect tone from a multitude of characters. You can't overstate how accomplished "Mad Men" is at understanding the vagaries of dialogue among disparate characters. …

The Boston Globe says:

… a tour de force of starched-white emptiness and emotional evasion. …

Variety says:

… As with any great series, "Mad Men" is becoming richer as these plot strands grow, establishing an engrossing serialized life beyond the hip, reverberating cultural references that demonstrate the smoking-drinking-closeted '60s aren't necessarily "good ol' days" to be mourned, despite the cheery Norman Rockwell image that cultural conservatives proffer. …

The Hollywood Reporter says:

… From screening the first two episodes, what's already clear is that creator-showrunner-writer-chief neurotic Matthew Weiner isn't stumbling from the gate working feverishly to match the hype but has instead subtly raised his game. Where we might think his crafting the hot show of the moment might inspire a push into broader territory, Weiner is, in a brilliant creative strategy, pulling back instead to evoke a richer, more mysterious character tapestry. In other words, far from devolving into soapy Madison Avenue pablum, "Mad Men" is painstakingly building its way to genuine greatness. …

10 p.m. Sunday. AMC.

Three-For-Two Blu-Ray Sale!!