The new season of AMC’s “Mad Men,” which makes its premiere at 10 p.m. on Sunday, comes with a special request that critics not give away the “pivotal storyline moments” in the first two episodes, and allow the audience to discover them for themselves.

That’s presuming they can find them, of course. One of the retro charms of the first season of “Mad Men” was that it moved at the stately pace of someone returning to work from a five-martini lunch, and that continues to be the case this year, as does the suspicion that this is a show that’s all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Even if there is a planned destination, it’s reaching it so slowly the audience may drop like house flies in winter long before it gets there. After all, how many times can you watch the show’s star, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), furrow his brow, smoke an herbal cigarette while pretending to smoke a real one, and take a long, pensive pull on a fake alcoholic drink, and convince yourself that this is real drama as opposed to a televised version of an interior decoration magazine?

As far as I’m concerned, it’s getting harder. I like the idea of “Mad Men,” and — whether or not it really gets it right — it has richly re-created a world most of us had stopped thinking about. But where are the characters? Look around the table during one of the “creative” meetings at Sterling Cooper and ask yourself how many people slumped there in an alcoholic stupor you’d actually want to talk to. The fact is, Draper aside, most of them are bores, the human version of drained batteries. Baby-faced Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) has all the properties of the traditional office villain — he’s a shameless, back-stabbing suck-up who’ll do anything to get ahead — except for the truly vital ones of being interesting and inspiring genuine fear.

The women — Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson, the secretary promoted to junior copywriter, and Christina Hendricks as the uber-buxom head secretary who is also a master office politician — are marginally more interesting, but hardly enough to keep a show afloat. As for Draper’s wife, Betty, played by January Jones, she’s lovely to look at, but that’s about it.

Perhaps appropriately, the season opener gets started in the doctor’s office, where Draper is informed that his blood pressure (160/100) is too high for a man of 36, and that he’s drinking and smoking too much. Draper shrugs it off (when asked why he sees a doctor so rarely, he replies that he eats “a lot of apples”), but there’s a drearily predictable payoff on Valentine’s Day when he and Betty spend the night at the Savoy.

The big theme of the episode is the youth snapping at Draper’s heels. There’s a new administration in the White House, and we are treated to extended real-life footage of Jackie Kennedy giving a television crew a tour of the White House. This has its own fascination, and is perhaps further proof that “Mad Men” is a work of dramatic fiction with the soul of a documentary.

A bigger problem for Draper is the fact that the country is growing younger, not to mention cheekier. The higher-ups at Sterling Cooper are being pressured by clients to hire younger, creative talent to reflect the first stirrings of boomer rebellion happening on the streets, which are “rotten with kids.” (When will the Beatles arrive?) Hell, no one under 25 even drinks coffee anymore, just Coca Cola, and Sterling Cooper has a coffee account to sell. Furthermore, the sheen is coming off Draper’s ad-man wizardry. “You know, there are other ways to think about things than the way you think about them,” he’s told by a superior who’s older than he is, but evidently more savvy.

Poor Draper is even forced to interview two young men (one, a writer, is 24, and the other, an artist, is 25, barely speaks English, and comes to the meeting wearing a fisherman’s sweater) who’ve apparently made a splash in the creative end of the business. Draper is resolutely unimpressed, perhaps because he has no idea who they are. They’re like aliens to him. It’s as if he’s just been visited by two time travelers from Google. “You’re talking as if they’re some fresh version of us,” he protests to his boss and pal, Roger Sterling (John Slattery). “They’re not. Young people don’t know anything.”

“Well, let me put this in a more plain context for you. Prove me wrong,” Sterling replies.

The big cultural reference in the first episode is the New York School poet Frank O’Hara, whose slim volume “Meditations in an Emergency,” cover prominently displayed, is being read by a snooty collegiate type sitting next to Draper during a scene in a bar. Draper asks him something about the book and is told he probably wouldn’t like it. Draper sees this as a challenge and, the next thing you know, he’s found a copy for himself — which would technically be pretty hard to do, as O’Hara was an obscure figure back then — and is reading it at the office.

Since I wrote a strangely prescient column about O’Hara and “Mad Men” last August, I won’t belabor the point now, but the poet — famous for his “I do this, I do that” poems about New York — makes an interesting counterpoint to the show’s fictional hero, not least because they were the same age and going into a creative tailspin at the same time. (O’Hara died in 1966, age 40.) Moreover, brilliant as he was, and glorious as his best work continues to be, O’Hara was very much a figure of the pre-Beatles era, just like Draper.

The episode ends with Draper walking to a postbox in the wintry suburbs to mail the book to a friend as he recites, in a voice-over, the concluding 13 lines (“Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern…”) from the poem “Mayakovsky.” The scene is beautifully rendered, mournful and touching, and Mr. Hamm delivers the poet’s lines with genuine authority. At a deeper level, they tell us more about Draper’s bifurcated character than anything we have seen in the preceding hour, or will see in the second episode, which definitely delivers a “pivotal storyline moment,” but feels very, very slow. But at least O’Hara provides a moment of unexpected and much-needed transcendence. Right now, this feels like a series in which almost nothing comes out of left field.

bbernhard@nysun.com