Two of the hardworking staff’s favorite television critics have very different takes on the sixth season premiere of AMC’s Mad Men.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz:

Don Draper’s Inferno

The sixth season of “Mad Men” brings a whiff of the social change that made the ’60s famous—the counterculture has arrived, with people turning on and dropping out, and there’s the Vietnam War in the background. None of this—it’s a whiff after all—has anything much to do with the world of Don Draper and friends. All are reintroduced in a premiere episode that lumbers along, overpopulated, burdened by the weight of its ambitions, flattened by misbegotten detours—a long lugubrious to-do involving Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and his mother comes to mind—but one, nevertheless, that surges to life in the end.

The Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert:

‘Mad Men’ characters continue to resonate as sixth season begins

[This story contains small spoilers.]

Wow, just wow.

AMC’s “Mad Men” returns for season 6 with two hours that are as rich and as deftly literary as anything in the history of the show. The premiere operates like a series of exquisitely written theatrical set pieces, one after another — Don and a drunk Vietnam soldier at a bar, Roger in analysis, Peggy as a boss, Betty in Greenwich Village — that add up to a moving, ironic, and often comic group portrait. And at the very, very end of the episode, after a few references to earlier seasons — note Megan’s zeal for the slide carousel, Don’s season 1 icon of the happy family — the story brilliantly pivots back around to its opening moments.

Which one will you agree with? As my late, great father-in-law Marvelous Marvin Sutton was fond of saying, “That’s what makes horse races.”