(Image source: AMC.com )

 

BY EVAN BUSH

ANCHOR  ZACH TOOMBS

 

Get the ice cubes prepped, the bitters primed and your Canadian club unshelved -- "Mad Men" is back after some backstage chaos. MSNBC introduces us.

 

“After a 17 month wait, Mad Men returns for its fifth season."

Roger Sterling: “We live in troubling times.”

Don Draper: “We do? Who couldn’t be happy with this?"

 

That’s what plenty of fans are saying after a long break from the series. Fans, including, it appears —  Charlie Rose — who gives us a rundown of the show’s acclaim.

 

“The AMC drama about a NY ad agency in the 1960s premiered in 2007. Since then, it’s won the emmy for outstanding drama four years in a row. Perhaps no other television program around has had as deep a cultural impact.”

 

But for some time, it looked like the show might not have come back. Bogged down in contract negotiations, Mad Men was delayed after creator and writer Matthew Weiner had a very public contract dispute about cost-cutting measures which would have included character cuts with the show’s network AMC. He now tells CNN .

 

‘The show always had a future, but whether I was going to be a part of it was definitely in question … ‘I walked away, and it was a hard thing to do.’

 

He came back, but more drama followed. The series took heat for a billboard marketing campaign some say hit too close to home for the New-York-set show. Some felt minimalist banners erected on city buildings across the nation inappropriately evoked 9/11. Esquire  writes.

 

“AMC stands weirdly accused of making reference to 9/11, in its promotional poster for Mad Men 's fifth season... On the one hand, the poster is merely a continuation of the art that has accompanied the show since its inception...At the same time, the poster... seems out to remind viewers that the show is really about the Falling Man... that for all its American-Century trappings, it's set squarely in the age of American decline.”

 

Few plot details have been revealed about the fifth season — the Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan notes — that’s because Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner famously keeps the series under closely-guarded lock and key.


“...it's hard to resist the urge to tweak creator Matthew Weiner's insistence on absolutely no spoilers ever -- and to him, every single thing you could say about the show is a spoiler (as he said in not one, but two admonitory notes sent to the media before the season premiere). I expect hired thugs to break into my house for telling you that the following words will be uttered in the Season 5 premiere: ‘baked beans.’”

 

We imagine Old-Fashioneds will be back, too. Hopefully, Weiner won’t chase us down for that revelation.