Far too often lately, I’ve been faced with TV shows that I really liked in the early seasons trying my patience in the most recent ones.  I know that pretty much any show is going to have ups and downs in quality and I’m resigned to riding out the lows in my viewing life.  Luckily, with Mad Men I haven’t had to do that yet.

With the beginning of its third season, Mad Men continues to be the best written and best acted show of television, hands down.  OK, I would say that it has a little competition for Best Ensemble from Big Love, but Mad Men does an even better job of giving everyone in the cast something meaty to do.

With Matthew Weiner at the helm, Mad Men is the heir to The Sopranos throne.  And like its predecessor, Mad Men is capable of making things work that just shouldn’t be done.  Take the opening of Season Three.  Don Draper is warming up milk on the stove.  And as he does it, we see scenes of his parents and birth in the rooms around him.  This sort of blurring place and time, flashback and introspection can be horribly jarring when done wrong.  Here it is a unique way to deliver crucial backstory for our main character.

A lot of what works with Mad Men boils down to the creative staff’s intimate knowledge of the characters they are writing combined with the actors’ ability to embody them fully.  There is rarely a false note with the performances.  And therefore every plot turn and twist is utterly and often painfully believable.  Take for example this season’s takeover by the Brits, which has led to Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove being offered a shared promotion.  Campbell’s reaction to the perceived slight, which seems to be a slow steady walk toward self-destruction, only is possible because of the consistency and obsessiveness with which Mad Men has drawn his insecurity over the past two seasons.  Such is the rule on this show, not the exception.

I do admit to enjoying the peripheral characters and their struggles a bit more than the central agony of Don Draper avoiding his past and screwing up his marriage.  This core of the series is as well done as the rest, but the overall pain of it is sometimes hard to take.  John Hamm and January Jones are wonderful and exhausting in their meticulous portrayals.

There is no high-concept here, and that is refreshing in itself.  In a way, it lets the folks at Mad Men have an infinite canvas to paint their picture on.  Luckily for all of us, they know exactly what they want to do and how to do it.