Mad Men, Mad Men Season 5 | featured news

After 18 months of waiting, an average of 3.5 million people tuned in Sunday to watch “Mad Men’s” fifth-season debut. That’s a series best for the show — and about 600,000 more people than watched the fourth-season debut in July 2010. “Mad Men” had been off the air since October 2010, following the fourth-season finale, as the studio, the network and the creator wrangled over this and that — product placement within the show, adding another ad break, creator’s salary, blah, blah, blah.

This post-episode mini-analysis of “Mad Men” could have focused on the already dysfunctional marriage between Don and Megan Draper, a relationship that — as Sunday’s season five premiere, “A Little Kiss,” demonstrated — apparently involves Don’s usual callousness, upward career mobility for Megan and your standard make-up sex prompted by half-naked house cleaning.

The advance copy of the new episode of “Mad Men” — the first in too many moons — arrived the other day. It was handsomely packaged, of course, and closely trailed by an e-mail plea from its meticulously controlling creator, Matthew Weiner, who asked critics not to tell you anything that happens when the show returns for a fifth season, two-hour premiere Sunday night on AMC.