Don's surprise 40th gives us one of those special Mad Men moments ... Jessica Paré and Jon Hamm in Mad Men. Photograph: Ron Jaffe/AMC The Great Hiatus is over, Mad Men returns. On Sky Atlantic though, and that will be a shame for many. BBC4 felt like the right place for it - a place for a Freeview/Guardianista/Mad Men kind of person. Have you seen it, marvellous, that Don Draper's a rascal isn't he, you would, though, wouldn't you? You probably have ... But every last penny of licence-fee money went on paying will.i.am's fee to be a judge on The Voice. So to get involved with Don and co means contributing £20 a month to the Murdochs - boo. Cheaper, more honourable, perhaps, to wait for the box set if you don't mind not being part of the conversation. Which will be about what? Race, for one. It's a subject that MM has previously only skirted round the edges of. Now we've got to 1966 and the civil-rights movement is making more and more noise right outside the open window, out of which the vile young bucks of a rival agency, Y&R, are chucking water bombs. Our SCDP lot are hardly better, though somehow - by accident, really - they end up appearing moderately progressive, and this double episode ends up with a bundle of CVs from African-American candidates in the in-tray. A black character to come, perhaps? Change - that's what's really going on, and being demanded - not just by the civil-rights activists but by women. There's change in the detail, too - the clothes are getting brighter, the skirts shorter, the apartments cooler, the parties and the music better, the family unit less tight. There's a strong sense of the new v the old. Mad Men feels as if it's finally getting into the 60s proper - or the 60s that most people now think of as the 60s. While the old guard are still wearing suits and knocking back tumblers of whisky, outside on the balcony the younger ones are smoking reefers (or whatever they were called back then) before going home with each other. To be honest it is not the most thrilling of series openers in terms of what the main characters get up to - well, not until the party anyway. It's slow, even. Don's still doing what Don does, though now (or more like just for now) to new young wife Megan; Pete's being a prat, as ever; Roger's got nothing to do at all; Joan, lonely and paranoid at home, rubs cream into her (and Roger's) new baby's creases; at work Peggy still struggles against a raging tide of misogyny, gasping for breath in the smoke-clogged air. At last, though, there are some signs of the tide abating, and I think for the first time ever in Mad Men a character (Pete) says: "Please don't smoke in here." See, there's that change! If it wasn't for what was going on outside the window then, Mad Men would simply be a soap opera set in an ad agency, and would be in danger of getting stale, however fine the writing. What it is so good at, though, is putting these characters into the context of a time and a place (and what a time and what a place). So, as the Y&R idiots lob water bombs out of the window at the marches, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner lobs bombs from the outside back in. Kinda. You know what I mean, anyway. And even if I wasn't exactly on the edge of my seat, it has sucked me slowly back in with it. Again. Oh, and the party - Don's surprise 40th - is a joy, one of those special Mad Men moments. A joy to everyone except Don, that is (Megan takes no notice of Peggy's warning, that men don't like surprises). It's all there in that room, in Don and Megan's beautiful new deluxe apartment - the smoke, the prejudice, the old, the new, 1966, change. And then Megan takes the microphone, joins the band, sings a saucy French song to her new husband. Zou Bisou Bisou, Oh you kiss kiss. It causes a mixture of reactions - surprise, charm, excitement among the men, a fair amount of embarrassment, jealousy. And, in Don, a helluva lot of undisguisable horror. Trouble ahead, I'd say. But the moment belongs to Jessica Paré, who plays Megan. The star of this show, she is what a lot of the conversation will be about I reckon. You can see her heresinging Zou Bisou Bisou on YouTube, even if you won't subscribe to the Murdochs and you're missing out on the rest.