The Boys are Back in Town.

“A more interesting measure of the show’s impact is the fact that its title has become a kind of shorthand: you can now talk about a Mad Men skirt or lampshade or pickup line where once you might have used ‘space age’ or ‘Kennedy era’ or ‘Neanderthal.’ But while the show, like its subject, has many surface pleasures–period design, period bad behavior (if you like high modernism, narrow lapels, bullet bras, smoking, heavy drinking at lunch, good hotel sex, and bad office sex, this is the series for you)–at its core Mad Men is a moving and sometimes profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface, and on the deeper mysteries of identity. The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest.“

It’s that time of year again: As seen pretty much everywhere of late — the quote above is via Bruce Handy at Vanity Fair — AMC’s Mad Men returns for Season 3 this Sunday.