Giving expression to repression

Last week’s foot incident, when an all-American tractor ran over an invading Brit in the Sterling Cooper offices, was the loudest “Mad Men’’ has been since the August premiere. Even the death of Betty’s father a few weeks back arrived on a downbeat - without a tense build up and with only modest fallout from little, haunted Sally.

Surely, with all the awards and media-love that “Mad Men’’ has won in the past two years, including two best drama Emmys, Weiner must feel some pressure - internal and/or external - to “grow’’ his audience. A few more twists and obvious water-cooler moments, like those involving Don’s mysterious past in season 1, might draw in reticent viewers, right? Subtle psycho-dramatics such as Peggy taking roommate-ad advice from Joan, or Betty reminding her father “I’m your little girl,’’ aren’t exactly going to set the message boards on fire.

And the humor - a guy nicknamed “Ho Ho,’’ another nicknamed “Number 2’’ - is usually buried in the texture of the scripts. It’s not of the infectious laugh-riot variety.

And yet Weiner and his writers have stubbornly made the six episodes so far about subtext, about what’s not being said, but what we know is being felt. So much of the drama takes place in the spaces between the lines of dialogue. The show has held fast to its literary identity; I don’t mean that it’s strewn with literary references so much as it needs to be “read’’ actively as you would a book. To be entertained fully by “Mad Men,’’ viewers need to go looking for themes in the margins - about America, identity, family, and the culture of change. If you dig, you can even find Medgar Evers lurking in Betty’s drugged hallucinations.

The “Mad Men’’ writers set up rich parallels but never spell them out. The parallels are there for us to discover: the prison guard with Don waiting for Betty at the hospital, and the prison guard of a nurse who bullied Betty into giving birth. The writers paralleled two unforgettable bedroom scenes this season: Sal had a go at the Ann-Margret “Bye Bye Birdie’’ sequence, during which his wife withered from her awareness that her husband is gay; and two weeks earlier, Peggy delivered her own confused version of “Bye Bye Birdie’’ in the mirror. In that diptych, built around an iconic movie scene of the early 1960s, two characters revealed what they want to be, and what they are afraid to be.

Sometimes, simply the unspoken parallel between then and now - what has changed and what hasn’t since the early 1960s - drives the drama.

There’s nothing wrong with big twists and pulse-quickening buildups, of course; “True Blood,’’ which is as extroverted as “Mad Men’’ is introverted, has used those conventions brilliantly. So have series such as “Dexter’’ and some of the better network procedurals. But “Mad Men’’ needs to stay dramatically repressed, for the most part, to evoke a critical quality of its time period. If the characters displayed the emotional exhibitionism of, say, the Walker family on “Brothers & Sisters,’’ the show would lose its hypnotic power. “Mad Men’’ is best when it stirs, rather than stampedes, our imaginations. Thankfully, Weiner hasn’t sacrificed that key ingredient.

I’m grateful this show works so differently from nearly everything else on the air. To oversimplify it, “Mad Men’’ exists in our reactions to what we see. Weiner and his writers don’t pin down how we should feel; they leave it all suspended, little bits of melodrama, quiet character revelations, cultural snapshots. You have to return to the episodes after you’ve seen them, put the pieces together, to really see the show.

There’s plenty of fine material blowing in the wind on “Mad Men,’’ if you pay close attention.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.