Joe's View

Expect to see more features on “Mad Men” than on “Salt” in this weekend’s entertainment sections.

The return of the hit AMC series for its fourth season, right in the middle of the summer, shows how much things have changed in movies and television over the past few years.

With kiddie fare clogging the multiplexes, the 35+ crowd will be staying home Sunday night for the unveiling of a new episode of what is arguably the most prestigious U.S. television series of the moment.

“Mad Men” is equipped with many of the attributes that used to be associated with sophisticated Hollywood movies — complex characters, strong period production and costume design, and ambiguous plotting that leaves lots of room for post-show discussion.

AMC sent me an advance copy of Sunday night’s show and I am happy to report that series creator Matthew Weiner and his amazing collaborators are still working in peak form.

“Mad Men” continues to explore the galvanic changes in American culture in the early 1960s — both at home and in workplaces — and each episode acts as a brilliantly bitter pill. It’s like a small, weekly dose of Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road” or John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.”

With the distance of 50 years, however, Weiner is able to view the Manhattan business world of the 1960s — and the suburban satellites where the wives and kids lived — with a satirical detachment that wasn’t possible for Yates and Cheever, who were living and writing in the middle of the long-vanished era.

The cigarette smoking, the heavy drinking and the sexist behavior were just accurate background details in the books and films of 1964. In “Mad Men,” they become running sick jokes.

The other sick joke just under the surface is the slight envy that contemporary viewers must feel about the job security that the office drones of a half-century ago enjoyed. Yes, the “Mad Men” were growing tumors in their lungs (and elsewhere) from bad behavior and, yes, their women were treated like second class citizens, but those suit-and-tie-wearing middle class men could count on a steady paycheck for most of their adult lives.

The first episode of season four has a very clever bracketing device — Don Draper giving two different interviews to promote the new advertising agency he has formed with some of his old associates from Sterling Cooper.

In the opening scene, Draper bombs with a reporter from Advertising Age. In the closing scene, he pulls the wool over the eyes of a much more sophisticated journalist from The Wall Street Journal. We see a slick and shallow guy becoming even slicker and shallower.

Because it is now a big hit, the AMC series is becoming more adult in its sexual content — the recently divorced Draper passes part of Thanksgiving, 1964, with a hooker in his bed, and the office banter between the men sounds more profane than the talk in the earlier seasons.

Weiner has been very gutsy in moving his characters forward several months in time with each new season — it might have been easier to focus on 1960 for several years. I can’t wait to see how he handles the huge shifts in pop culture and sexual behavior that took place in the second half of the revolutionary decade.