Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation links to a NYRB essay on the weaknesses of Mad Men. As someone who used to dislike the show for the reasons given in the essay, and now likes it, let me offer a qualified defense.
Mad Men is ill-suited to weekly consumption. As far as I can tell, the functional unit of the show is the season, not the episode. This means that any one particular episode is likely to put the viewer somewhere in the middle of the action, with very little immediate gratification. (This season's finale raised but never resolved the potential failure of the main advertising agency. It drove a lot of people crazy.) But given the whole season, the picture comes together impressively.
The dialogue is impressively minimal, and to an uncommon extent requires the viewer to figure things out. It doesn't help the case of the essayist that he gets several of the plot points wrong, alleges some plots have no resolution (which do), and apparently is of the belief that the central character of the show must be an object of some admiration. (Clearly, he's not seen season 4: Don Draper is a horrible person)
As it happens, I have a whole crazy theory about how tv has become an auteur medium. In this theory, Matthew Weiner is tv's Terrence Malick: the people who don't like his work will admit it's pretty, but aren't willing to grant him any more than that. But to explain that at greater length would be a significant digression, so...
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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