Mad Love

Can the men and women of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce sink any lower?

With the prostitution of Joan (Christina Hendricks) to win the Jaguar account and the suicide of Lane (Jared Harris) — a gruesome hanging on the back of his office door — “Mad Men” turned a corner forever last season.

The merry conga lines at the Christmas party seemed a distant memory. Roger (John Slattery) dropped acid to escape the boredom of another failed marriage. Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) had a dead-end affair with a depressed woman who ended up forgetting him after she had electroshock therapy. All the things that success was supposed to bring — money, fame, sex — fell short of the mark. Even Don, seemingly enraptured at the beginning of last season by his vivacious second wife, Megan (Jessica Paré), was bored with her by the end.

While Megan, who left the ad agency to launch an acting career, was shooting a commercial, Don wandered off the set to a nearby bar. When a blonde tried to pick him up — “Are you alone?” — he didn’t even say, “I’m married.”

Does Don, the Madison Avenue Romeo, still love his wife?

“I think he does,” says Jon Hamm. As the face of the show, Hamm always answers quiestions thoughtfully. Sitting in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where he and several fellow cast members are meeting with reporters, Hamm is dressed casually, in gray jeans, a navy sweater and a gray denim jacket. “I think he loved Betty all those years. Love is a complicated word for somebody like this guy. Part of what we explore in this season is why that is. What kind of person has this crazy, detached, difficult relationship with the word ‘love’?”

Someone’s who a serial cheater, obviously.

“It’s beyond a thrill at this point,” says show creator Matthew Weiner about Don’s constant wandering eye. “It’s psychological. You might find out why this season. When Don was faithful, people were disappointed.”

Some people still give Don the benefit of the doubt, like his current wife, Megan.

“I don’t whether it’s naiveté or optimism but she trusts him,” says Paré, who made a sensational debut on the show last year when she sang the song “Zou Bisou Bisou” at Don’s surprise 40th birthday party. In person, she’s 5-feet-11 in heels, and wearing a black dress that has a frilly black-and-white bodice. “I think that she loves him and is willing to see the best. But she’s not an idiot.”

If “Mad Men” fans like their characters glamorous yet corrupt, like soiled satin, Weiner delivered in spades last season, never more so than in Episode 11 — “The Other Woman” — where Pete asks Joan to sleep with a client to land the Jaguar account. Joan was willing to sell herself if she was given a five percent stake in the firm.

Unwilling to take the sole blame for this demoralizing chapter in the history of the show, Vincent Kartheiser goes hilariously on the defensive.

“Hold on,” he says. “Because people have totally absolved Joan of guilt here. Like she’s this great woman who’s doing all the best things in the world.”

Wearing blue slacks and a red-and-blue checked shirt, Kartheiser leans forward in his chair and starts imitating Margaret Hamilton in her “Wizard of Oz” role as the Wicked Witch of the West. “And Pete, the awful Pete, who came to her, ‘Will you, my little pretty, do this deed for me?’” Kartheiser sits up straight again. “No, no. That’s mostly how she got to where she got. Based on her sexuality.

“It has absolutely nothing to do with Pete Campbell,” Kartheiser says. “It has everything to do with Joan.”

Christina Hendricks defends Joan’s actions as worthwhile because it secures a future for Joan, a single mother. But does her sacrifice give her the upper hand?

“I think Joan sort of always has the upper hand,” says Hendricks who is wearing a marigold sequined sweater and skirt by L’Wren Scott. “But you have to remember, he’s the one who brought it into that room of men. And they all signed on to it.”

Will Joan have her moment of revenge?

“You’ll have to wait,” Hendricks says in her permanently sexy voice. “But I think you’ll be pleased.”

Even if Joan and Pete helped to send Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce on its present downward spiral, the firm is still doing well, says John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling. And that’s what counts.

“The checks don’t stop coming in so they end up as successful as they’ve ever been — ever. Despite everything,” Slattery says.

Like many members of the cast, Slattery, looking dapper in tuxedo pants and a white shirt, is afraid if he reveals any spoilers he will get fired and prefers to take the long view of the show.

“It’s about surviving the choices that we make. It’s about getting up again and going to that workplace again in front of all those people you’ve behaved so badly in front of,” he says. “I think that’s the point of it. That’s the struggle of the people on the show. Someone’s rebounding from the struggle and getting healthy and someone is going down the rat hole. Everyone’s on their own life raft.”

It’s unclear from the first two episodes, which premiere tonight at 9 p.m., who is going down the rat hole, but it’s fair to say Don’s in bad shape. During the Drapers’ 1968 Christmas holiday in Hawaii, his idea of a beach read is Dante’s “Inferno.” In a voiceover, Hamm recites, “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.”

On this show, there’s always trouble in paradise — the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are recalled in the headline “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year” — and Weiner says, “There’s some bad stuff” coming our way.

But there’s also a lot to look forward to. Betty, who only appeared in a handful episodes last time around, is back in a big way. And so is fashion. Outfits inspired by Pucci and dresses with empire waists will be popular for Megan. “I’ve had hundreds of hours of fittings at Western Costume. They always have so much beautiful stuff,” Paré says.

And even voluptuous Joan finds a way to fit in with changing fashions. “We have lifted hemlines and made things more A-line for Joan,” Hendricks says. “Joan knows what works for her so she’s going to do a little tailoring.”

Now that “Mad Men” has finished filming six seasons, the end of show’s run is in sight — only one more season. It will truly be the end of an era.

“I don’t think any of us have taken the time to process the end of the show yet,” says Hamm. “I talked extensively to Tina Fey and my friends on ‘30 Rock’ and they just went through this. It was emotional, as it should be. They did seven seasons and had the great fortune to go out the way they wanted to go out. I saw John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer out at dinner the other night. They’d just come from their final table reading of ‘The Office.’ They were very kind of nonplussed and distracted as well.

“You can’t have an experience that lasts this long and not be so enriched by it. And have

so many wonderful people in your life without it meaning something. And it’s a meaningful thing to me, this show. Obviously, I take tremendous pride in it. So it’s the one thing I can point to that’s given me a career and the opportunity to do so many other things. So it’s going to be devastating. But at the same time it will be hopefully creatively fulfilling to come to the end of the story. I’m a fan of finishing books.”

MAD MEN

Tonight, 9 p.m., AMC