Last season, Don Draper had a mistress in the Village; the affair ended during a pot-smoking party when he photographed her with a Polaroid camera and realized she was in love with a beatnik wannabe  only by seeing it in the picture. This season, African-Americans are moving beyond operating the elevators at Sterling Cooper, though to what extent remains unclear. Weiner is incredibly paranoid about plot details finding their way to the media. “How do you know that?” he snapped about even the most innocuous things I mentioned about the second season. He is used to the secrecy of “The Sopranos,” and every leak, large or small, is a wound. He’s not wrong, of course. Why ruin the suspense? The first season ended on Thanksgiving 1960, and the fact that I knew that the second season picks up on Valentine’s Day 1962 horrified him.

“It’s too much of a soap opera to pick up with the next month,” he said, explaining his decision. “There’s more storytelling in moving ahead and taking a season to find out what happened.” (That idea seems also to have occurred to Marc Cherry at “Desperate Housewives”; his next season picks up five years from now.)

The two leading women in “Mad Men” will be featured prominently this season. “Betty Draper is getting angry,” Weiner said of Don’s Stepford wife and the mother of his two children, played by January Jones. “She is an incredibly beautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looks good on paper. Her mother has just died, and she’s realized that when her beauty disappears she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband, and she doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified of dealing with that problem because she cannot get divorced, she cannot be single, she cannot start over. She is somewhat puritanical.”

Betty started seeing a psychiatrist last season, who reported on her “condition” regularly to her husband, in flagrant violation of her privacy. “Basically we’re dealing with the emotions of a child here,” the shrink told Don. At home, when Betty expressed grief about her mother’s death, Don told her, “Mourning is just extended self-pity.”

As a Bryn Mawr graduate and former model turned infantilized, marginalized housewife, she certainly has reason to be angry. Jones, who looks as perfect as her character even at the end of a long day, told me: “Betty doesn’t say what she feels to Don. She can only speak to Glen.” (Glen is the 9-year-old son of the most terrifying woman in the neighborhood  Helen Bishop, a divorcee. He is played by Marten Weiner, Matthew’s son.) Glen and Betty have a simpatico relationship that borders on both the bizarre and the inappropriate. “He’s an adultlike child and she’s a childlike adult, so they have something very much in common,” Jones said. “She’s so lost. She’s supposed to be this perfect Grace Kelly wife of a businessman, and it’s just not going the way she imagined.”

Jon Hamm’s assignment as Don is to locate the emotions in a man who spends his life denying them. “Don’s trying to be a better guy,” Hamm said. “He’s trying to get back to what it means to be a person in a family. He has a marriage he’s not that involved in, kids he’s not that involved in, a brother he wasn’t involved with at all. He realizes these things have consequences. He tries to make amends a day late and a dollar short. That’s his great tragedy. He wanted the image of the perfect family, so he married the beautiful model. He takes his cues from advertising, the Coke commercial with the two kids and the dog. And there’s no there there, and why is that? It’s a curious thing.”

Elisabeth Moss plays Peggy Olson, Don’s fresh-faced, smart-as-a-whip secretary, whose knack for copywriting prompts Don to promote her at the end of Season 1. She also gains more and more weight, as surprised herself as the viewers to discover she was pregnant from a night with Pete Campbell, the ambitious, resolutely untalented scion of an old New York family and resident irritant at Sterling Cooper (played skillfully by Vincent Kartheiser). “In the midst of all the sexism,” Weiner said, “Peggy succeeds because the men will take a good idea from anywhere. The pregnancy was just a twist, but I wanted to do a story about a woman getting fat because she couldn’t deal with being sexualized all the time, and that more important, she was never going to be taken seriously professionally until that happened. She becomes a guy, and they give her a big punch in her shoulder. She makes it.”