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100The writing is a real thing of beauty - from the aforementioned nuance to searing workplace witticisms and pitch-perfect tone from a multitude of characters.
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Based on the first episode of the second season, "Mad Men" is still one of the best series currently on television, if not the best.
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90Mad 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.
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88While this Sunday's premiere gets the season started a bit slowly, Episode Two is the rarest kind of TV show there is - one that you hope will never end.
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This season holds promise, not lacking in the detail that makes the series so enjoyable.
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90The vintage look carries a potent, contemporary kick. Here's the rare series that lives up to the advertising hype.
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91The premiere jumps the series from 1960 to 1962, but it plays coy with most of last season's cliff-hangers, including the whereabouts of Peggy's son with married exec Pete Campbell (played with oily brilliance by Vincent Kartheiser). It's quite a tease, but the debut proves Mad Men is as smart as ever
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90As 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.
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90Mad Men returns for season 2 in excellent form: There's a rich and active subtext in this series, you just have to discover it.
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90Far from devolving into soapy Madison Avenue pablum, Mad Men is painstakingly building its way to genuine greatness.
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90As hard as it might be to imagine after last year's dazzling debut, this period piece about life in a mid-sized Madison Avenue ad agency during the early 1960s returns tonight looking and feeling even stronger, smarter and more focused than it was.
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90Besides the fine acting, writing and an attention to period detail that borders on the obsessive, what makes this show so ambiguous and pleasantly iridescent is narrative tension
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90There's a sense of gathering gloom as this exceptional drama gains steam in its second season, a feeling that the individual and his or her high-minded goals and values will be dragged under by the wheels of industry and the restrictive norms of the culture, all in the name of modernity and progress.
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100Terrifically acted and gorgeously produced, this is a show that's both funny and frightening, that can simultaneously make you miss the '60s and feel blessed that they're gone.