Has 'Mad Men' lost a step?

Since "Mad Men" premiered in the summer of 2007, critics have pretty much fallen all over themselves about the show.

And that includes yours truly.

After its first season, the Television Critics Association gave "Mad Men" three of our 11 annual awards — best new program, best drama and program of the year. After its second season, we calmed down a bit and only named it best drama.

And, oh yeah, it also won nine Emmys in the past couple of years (on 23 nominations) — including back-to-back wins as outstanding drama series and for outstanding writing for a drama series.

That's a lot to live up to.

I feel almost disloyal, somehow, saying this, but I'm not entirely sure that "Mad Men" has lived up to all of that in Season 3.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still a huge fan of the show. And I think it is far-and-away better than most of the other drama series on TV.

But is it as good as it was in Seasons 1 and 2? Well ...

It hardly sounds possible, but there's been both too much going on and not enough going on all at the same time. There are so many characters and so many story lines that some of them seem to disappear for weeks on end.

And we're talking about a series that only has a 13-episode season.

Yet on several occasions this season, we get to the end of an episode and it's hard not to notice that not much of anything has happened.

Oh, it's still great fun to watch for the incredible job of re-creating 1963 the show does and the characters and the atmosphere, but there hasn't always been much in the way of moving the plot forward.

Frankly, the show has pretty much got to deliver a big bang of some sort in Sunday's season finale (8, 9 and 11 p.m., AMC) to pay us off for our patience.

There are two bad things that can happen when a show gets as much praise as "Mad Men" has gotten. Either the producers/writers try to hard, or they succumb to the Ken Burns Syndrome.

After the huge success of Burns' documentary series "The Civil War" in 1990, there was nobody to tell him "No."

And so we ended up with an 181/2-hour documentary about baseball and a 19-hour documentary about jazz.

Not that they weren't good, but they were also excessive. Even for fans of baseball, jazz and Burns.

What with all the success "Mad Men" creator/executive producer Matthew Wiener has had in the past couple of years, is there anybody who can tell him he needs to remember that plot is important?

Maybe not.

And that may be why the third season of "Mad Men" hasn't been quite as good as the first two were.

e-mail: pierce@desnews.com