Since AMC let slip a few trailers this week to promote the new season of “Mad Men,” I figured this would be a good time to revisit the cocktail party thrown by the network during the January TCA Press Tour, where I was able to get a few minutes with a few of the cast members, but here’s the score, so you don’t get too excited: I got a couple of minutes one on one with John Slattery (Roger Sterling) and Rich Sommer (Harry Crane), got a single question with Jon Hamm, and was able to ask precisely nothing of Christina Hendricks. I did, however, stand next to her for an extended period of time, and just for the record, she’s just as gorgeous as in person as she is on TV and in photos…which, come to think of it, might have had something to do with why I never managed to ask a question. (Mostly, though, it was because I’m not into trying to out-talk other people, which was the modus operandi of just about everyone else surrounding her at the time.)

Oh, and speaking of not getting too excited…? Total-lack-of-spoiler alert: there ain’t a single lick of new footage in any of the below trailers. Thanks for nothing, Matthew Weiner. But, hey, at least they serve to remind you of how much you missed these characters.

Man oh man, March 25 seems like a lifetime away…

One of the big pieces of news to emerge about the return of “Mad Men” was that one of the episodes in the new season – not the season premiere, although it was the first episode the cast filmed upon coming back to work – was directed by Jon Hamm. While standing in a scrum during the cocktail party, I was privy to some of Hamm’s reflections on the experience.

“It was great, honestly. Part of it is that we’re all very close, and we’re all very good friends, and we’ve all worked together now for almost six years. So for me, it was very easy to just say, ‘Okay, that was great, let’s do it again, let’s try it a different way.’ Simple direction, not too complicated, and I didn’t try to overreach. I didn’t try to do too much. It wasn’t about camera moves. I didn’t try to be David Fincher. Part of it was, like, ‘Let’s see if I can do this and not run the train off the tracks.’”

Eventually, I managed to get in my one lonely question, which was to find out if, as director, he was in charge of the table read for the episode.

Hamm looked at me with equal parts good humor and incredulity. “Have you talked to Matt Weiner?” he asked, grinning. “Matt Weiner runs the table read.”

When I asked John Slattery how much of his excitement about the return of “Mad Men” was based directly on no longer having to be asked what he’d heard about when “Mad Men” was coming back, he laughed but couldn’t quantify a percentage.

“I’m just excited,” he said. “I just finished shooting last night, in fact.”

What, you mean all of Season Five?

“Yep,” he said, grinning. “And it went by in a blur, I’ll tell you that.”

When he first stepped back into the shoes of Roger Sterling, Slattery admitted that he had to find his groove. “I’m always off the first day back,” he admitted. “I mean, we were obviously gone for awhile this time, but I always feel, like, ‘How does all this work again?’ Plus, Jon Hamm was directing, so that was new. But he was great. Really, it was just good to be back. Plus, the scripts are better than they’ve ever been. I think so, anyway. And, yeah, I know that sounds like what you’re supposed to say, but we’ve all been commenting on it.”

Slattery described the “Mad Men” cast reads as amazing, but he said that even he and his cast members often find their hands tied by the secrecy surrounding the show’s scripts. “We – the cast – read these things like fans,” he said. “We can’t wait to get them, and once we do get them, we all sit around and read ‘em. If we have to, we’ll steal ‘em from whoever we can steal ‘em from – make-up, the hair department, some production head, whatever – just so we can sneak a read before we do our table read.”

No surprise here: Slattery can’t say a blessed thing about what we can expect in Season Five. Instead, I closed by asking him if, after learning that Roger was going to be writing a book, he was surprised as it became increasingly apparent that it was going to be a real snooze.

“Roger’s image of himself is certainly different from anyone else’s,” said Slattery, laughing. “But, you know, I think that’s what the whole show is about: all of these people have this image of themselves that they try to carry off, and in the end, it differs considerably from how everyone else sees them.”

Like I said, I didn’t get (or couldn’t manage) to ask Christina Hendricks a question that night. But, look, this shot was taken that night. Would you have been able to string two words together?

Rich Sommer is glad to be back at work, too. At the party, though, he was mostly just happy that AMC had finally deigned to release a few details about the return of the show.

“It’s just nice to have the news out,” he said. “They sent us a little thing a few days ago, saying, ‘This is what we’re going to be telling everyone, so you can talk about these things at the party.’ I was, like, ‘Oh, thank God…’ So now you know it’s going to be two hours on the first night back, you know Jon directed the first episode we filmed when we came back…”

But which of the plot points was Sommer most glad to be able to…

Sommer can’t resist a laugh. “Which of the plot points…?”

Sorry. Which of the talking points – God forbid Matthew Weiner should offer even the slightest bit of specifics as far as what we might see – was Sommer most glad to be able to finally discuss openly?

“Well, it has to be the return date,” said Sommer. “That’s nice because it’s the easiest to answer. I mean, I’ve had to lie straight to the face of people that I love when they asked, ‘So Jon directed the premiere?’ ‘Uh…yep.’ I have said, ‘Well, yeah, he directed the first episode,’ because it was the first episode that we shot this season. So I could say that without totally lying. I hate lying to people.”

So Sommer can’t say anything specific about the new season. Can he at least offer something general?

“For my money – and I know I’ve said this before, but I mean it – it’s the best season,” said Sommer. “I mean, I really, genuinely believe it. I wouldn’t say it otherwise. I don’t know how the hell Matt Weiner does it, but he has an amazing writing staff, and they just won’t let the other shoe drop. They just won’t. It’s great.”

Like Slattery, Sommer enjoys the experience of doing table reads with the rest of the “Mad Men” cast. Apparently, it’s just a big ol’ lovefest on that set.

“There’s giddiness at every table read,” said Sommer. “We are so fortunate to like each other. And I know a lot of shows say they do, but I go to shows and they don’t always. Some do. Some get along great. I know on ‘Modern Family’ they all love each other. But we really genuinely…there’s not a bad apple in the bunch, so it’s always very exciting to go to those table reads. And you know everyone’s gonna be there, because we don’t all work together all the time, so it’s the one time that we’re all together.”

As noted, Jom Hamm helmed the first episode filmed upon the cast’s return to work (though not, we cannot stress enough, the first episode of the season), and he likened the experience to when Slattery sat behind the camera a little while back.

“For me, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with a director is how they communicate with actors, because they’re looking for something, and they have to find a way to kind of get it out of you, to pull it out of you,” said Sommer. “And sometimes the direction for that will be a little…surface, if that makes sense. They’re going, ‘I want you to say it like this.’ But Hamm and Slattery are both actors, so they’re talking about the emotion and the feeling of a scene, which I love. If they tell me a scene feels too closed, if it needs to be more open…I love that. I can do that. When it’s a line reading, though, it’s a little harder. When someone says, ‘I want you to say it this way,’ I don’t really know how to inform that. But as actors, they know how to talk to actors.”

“Also,” Sommer added with a grin, “they’ve both been in the business for, like, a hundred years.”

Knowing that he had to run off to chat with other journalists, there was only one more pressing – and, theoretically, easily answered – question left to ask of Sommer: has he booked another appearance on “The Soup” yet?

“Not yet,” he said. “We talk about it all the time, though. I’m good friends with Joel (McHale) and K.P. (Anderson), the producer, and they always say that whenever I want to come back, there’s a place. So with ‘Mad Men’ coming back, I can almost assure you that I’ll be on there.”

Awesome. Which reminds me: LeVar Burton’s always turning up with you guys on “The Soup.” When are you going to get him on your show?

“We’ve got to do it!” said Sommer, with legitimate enthusiasm. “I mean, that guy’s great. For the moment, though, don’t worry: he’s definitely an honorary Mad Man.”

Make no mistake, this is not only your dad’s but also your grandfather’s whiskey. Depending on your age and where your family was during prohibition, it might even be your great-great-grandfather and/or grandmother’s whiskey. Say what you like about Canadian whisky, it’s stood the test of time.

Sometimes referred to, particularly in Canada, as rye despite the fact that it’s primarily made with corn spirits, Canadian whisky, unlike now resurgent American rye whiskey, never threatened to go away. Still, while some uninformed bartenders still think rye is just the name of a type of Jewish bread, it’s the rare bar that doesn’t stock Seagram’s V.O., Canadian Club, Crown Royal and often Black Velvet. Its the even rarer connoisseur or cocktail aficionado who will admit to being excited about them, with some liquor snobs deriding Canadian as “brown vodka.” Following their lead, younger drinkers who have taken to premium brands of bourbon and Scotch, have largely ignored it. That’s not to say unassuming Canadian Whisky has no fans among the cognoscenti. We kind of love it and no less an authority than cocktail historian David Wondrich suggests Canadian Club — a value-priced favorite of ours — as the perfect vehicle for an Old Fashioned, the most purist-friendly whiskey cocktail we know.

In any case, pop culture seems to be slowly becoming more aware of American rye whiskey’s almost-as-retro northern cousin. The 2008 primary elections saw Hillary Clinton swigging a much-discussed shot of Crown Royal, the very smooth Chivas Regal of Canadian. Though the label is angled so that the logo is just slightly out of our view, it’s clear that Canadian Club — first brewed by distilling legend Hiram Walker — is Donald Draper’s poison of choice on “Mad Men.” (In the first episode, newbie secretary Peggy Olson is informed that rye is the same as Canadian, and told it’s what her new boss drinks.) It also sure looks to be Canadian Club that washing up on the Jersey shore in HBO’s bootlegging themed early gangland drama, “Boardwalk Empire.” By law, Canadian whisky must be aged at least three years, though Canadian Club and Seagram’s V.O. are both aged for six

In fact, the popularity of Canadian whisky — which many insist must be spelled sans “e” — in the U.S. goes back to those dark days for everyone but gangsters between 1920 and 1933 when the sale and manufacture of liquor was illegal in the land of free and home of the brave, but thoroughly legal up north. Jewish-Canadian entrepreneur and liquor distributor Samuel Bronfman became wealthy and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams by staying more or less on the right side of the law while doing business with the likes of Al Capone. He purchased Joseph E. Seagram’s and Sons and launched what became, for a time, a massive commercial and media empire. (It’s worth noting that the line’s flagship brand, Seagram’s 7 Crown, best known as the non-7-Up ingredient in a “7 and 7,” is not technically Canadian whisky. The U.S. version, at least, is bottled in Indiana and marketed as “an American whiskey,” whatever that is.)

Since it’s primarily blended and is generally not a very complex kind of a whiskey, it’s likely that Canadian will never have the cachet of bourbon, rye, or Scotch, but its hipness quotient may be improving slightly. Canadian Club has shrewdly played on its history with a series of attention-grabbing print ads with the slogan “Damn right, your dad drank it.” The ads alluded to the allegedly racy lifestyles of fathers of yore and used actual family photographs from Canadian Club employees.

As for cocktail and liquor aficionados, New York Times writer Robert Simonson blogged some time ago that his contacts in the gourmet and mixology worlds became obviously bored at the mere mention of Canadian whisky. However, Simonson’s April 2011 article details how there are real changes brewing in the world of Canadian booze. He specifically cites the highly acclaimed Forty Creek distillery and also attempts by better known makers of Canadian whiskey to brew blends that will appeal to drinkers used to the more complex flavors of today’s premium whiskeys.

Forty Creek does appear to be the most prevalent of the “new style” Canadian whisky manufacturers and we were able to pick up a bottle on sale at out local big-box beverage emporium. Our reaction was a bit mixed; we still think Canadian Club is more tasty and given its extremely low price, difficult to beat. Even so, we anxiously await the arrival of more and better Canadian whiskys. It’s time to see if our polite and funny friends to our north can create some premium whiskeys that will give some real competition to Kentucky and Tennessee, not to mention Scotland and Ireland.