The Emmy buzz surrounding Mad Men is growing louder. USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly have all weighed in favorably for  the show concerning likely nominations. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone provides some cryptic hints about Season 2 from Mad Men's creator Matthew Weiner.

USA Today declares that no slate for the Best Drama category would be valid without Mad Men, "a gorgeously evocative look at America on the cusp of the '60s social revolution," and adds that Jon Hamm's performance as a "deceptively cool adman was simply one of the great breakthrough star turns of the season."

Echoing those plaudits, three television critics interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter cited Mad Men as a pick for Best Drama, with Dave Walker of The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) saying the show "was able to access a moment in time so accurately and with incredible fidelity, and I think his [Hamm's] performance had an awful lot to do with that." Entertainment Weekly, while calling Hamm an inevitable nominee for lead actor, also recognizes both John Slattery's "amoral silver-fox ad exec" and Vincent Kartheiser's "slippery young exec... greasy on the outside -- slimily insecure on the inside!" as possible best supporting actor contenders.

For those eager for a glimpse of Season 2, Weiner talks in Rolling Stone about personal dilemmas lurking in the background, even as the nation is gripped by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and says, "Don Draper is doing great and Dick Whitman is not doing great. In psychological terms, it's about the concept of the false self." Weiner also notes that he wants the series to span an entire decade, raising the intriguing specter of Hamm's Don Draper ending up with sideburns down the line.