Yay! Everyone jumped for joy last week when Lionsgate and AMC announced a third season of Mad Men. More time to wonder if Peggy will ever tell Pete about their baby, if Don and Betty will ever get back together, and whether Duck will finally be thrown overboard now that he's back on the sauce.

Well, hopefully all these characters will be involved, because as of yet the Emmy-nominated show hasn't drawn up any contracts for the stars. Or Mad Men's creator and executive producer, Matthew Weiner.

Hopefully AMC will pull their heads of their asses and realized MM is the best thing the network has going for it, or else we might end up watching a bastardized spin-off of Sterling and Joan's relationship on HBO.

On Sunday night, AMC's Mad Men walked away with the Emmy for best drama or comedy series, and AMC's Breaking Bad left the stage with a best actor Emmy for Bryan Cranston (best known for playing the Malcolm in the Middle dad). You might have assumed this was because Jon Hamm is an excellent actor who owns the small screen for 60 minutes each week. Or because Mad Men's showrunner Matthew Weiner knows just how long to let the camera hang on a scene. Or because in Breaking Bad, Cranston comes off brilliantly as a terminal meth producer.

All of which, in theory, is true. But the reason AMC — a basic cable station — left with its arms full on Sunday night wasn't because of its programming fare. It was because AMC mounted a glorious Emmy PR campaign, and it paid off.

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By now you're well aware of AMC's excellent Mad Men, the Jon Hamm-led drama set in the 1960s advertising world where three martini lunches and sleeping with the girls of the typing class was expected and celebrated. We count ourselves among the show's original fans — not these Johnny-come-latelys with their season one DVDs — and, having professionally stalked at least three of the cast members, are very clearly a little bit obsessed with this show. And now, everybody else will be too, because every damn one of you critics is sharing with America television's best-kept secret, from Entertainment Weekly (plastering it on the cover of their Summer TV Preview) and Vanity Fair (laid out in the June issue as the "high-water mark of male chauvinism") to today's New York Post (Linda Stasi is on the beat!).

But when the crowd forms to lift the champion atop its shoulders, the only thing that's left to happen is The Fall. You know what we mean: the backlash, where something we couldn't imagine not loving in suddenly the punching bag we throw knives at. Don't believe us?

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