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?

Critics, too, loved Lost; then they spent a year beating the crap out of its writers before finally coming around again. Rinse and repeat for Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy and Prison Break. That this never happened with Battlestar Galactica is only because the Sci-Fi was already a couple seasons in before everyone fell in love with it, and by they producers already announced it had a sell-by date and would wrap after the current fourth season.

Mad Men returns to AMC, where it scored just 900,000 viewers its first time out, on July 27, which means we have until now and then to manufacture the type of hatred that takes down a show like this. As is typical: Once America gets a hold of something it likes, it's only the natural course of action to kick the shit out of it until it's barely conscious or recognizable.

[Photo: VF]