MAD MEN IN CRISIS

In their second season, AMC's cigarette-smoking, scotch-drinking admen confront personal demons during rapidly changing times

"I wanted to show what it was like to have the world change around you," says Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. "You watch life pass, and you're the same person inside." For the second season of Weiner's acclaimed AMC show (July 27th, 10 p.m.), set at a New York advertising agency, the action leaps forward from 1960 to 1962, when Madison Avenue — and the rest of the country — would become riveted to the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis. But the personal dilemmas that gripped Don Draper and his colleagues at the end of last season — secret identities and surprise pregnancies — lurk in the background. "If you were having problems in your marriage and 9/11 happened," Weiner says, by way of analogy, "you still had a problem with your marriage."

Indeed, Mad Men's first season ended with square-jawed Draper, played by Jon Hamm, confronting an unhappy secret: Before stealing the identity of another soldier in Korea and making a new life, he was Dick Whitman, the orphaned child of a prostitute. Now, Weiner says, "Don Draper is doing great and Dick Whitman is not doing great. In psychological terms, it's about the concept of the false self."

Weiner says he would love his series to span an entire decade: "Right now, I don't even know if Don is somebody who's going to end up with sideburns or look exactly like he looked in 1960."

Waiting to film a scene early on a Tuesday morning, Hamm flips through a vintage advertising annual and confesses he never thought he'd get the part — for which he won a Golden Globe earlier this year. "I started at the bottom of everybody's list," Hamm says. "I loved the writing, but I thought they'd give it to a movie star." Then Hamm stops short at an ad, reprinted in the annual, that reminds him the Sixties were a very different time.

"Spray-on barbecue sauce?" he asks.

GAVIN EDWARDS

Photo: AMC