LOS ANGELES - We're walking, we're walking . . . and Matthew Weiner is talking.

Two days before his '60s period drama on AMC, "Mad Men," received 16 Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding drama - becoming, along with FX's "Damages," the first basic-cable series so honored - Weiner, the show's creator, last week was leading a tour of the show's sets at Los Angeles Center Studios.

It's the place where the show's central character, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) both lives and works and where the offices of fictional Manhattan advertising agency Sterling Cooper are only a short, sunny walk, not a numbing train ride, from the "colonial, country house" in Ossining, N.Y., that Draper shares with his wife, Betty (January Jones), and their two children.

Nothing in that house or office, whether it's the double bed, narrower than a modern queen or king, or the ashtrays "with incredible sayings on them," seems ordinary enough to escape Weiner's notice.

Indeed, "Mad Men" has attracted attention as much for its style as for its story, and it's clear, listening to Weiner, that the mannered drama about a man struggling to deal with a life he's essentially created out of whole cloth is inextricably linked to the cloth that's been chosen for the curtains, as well as to the paint on the walls, the rugs on the floor, even the table in the kitchen.

"This kitchen is very modern," he said, noting that the concept of an eat-in kitchen was relatively new in the early '60s, kitchens in old houses having been considered fire hazards.

And whether or not he chose the kitchen table himself, the idea that there was a table was almost certainly Weiner's.

"The first time we write something in a script - a human being, a room, anything, you must describe it. And then it's up for debate," said the former writer for "The Sopranos," who (now famously) took his show to basic cable when HBO wasn't interested.

Though it averaged only about a million viewers per episode in its first season, critical acclaim - including three Television Critics Association awards last weekend and some seriously good press - has, along with another new drama, "Breaking Bad," helped put AMC on the map as something beyond an old-movie channel.

With Season 2 picking up the story Sunday as "Mad Men" jumps ahead a little more than a year, to Valentine's Day 1962, Weiner would rather talk about AMC's higher profile than about whether the show's buzz will lead to higher ratings, telling reporters earlier this month, "I do hope that as AMC becomes more popular, that the show will draw a larger audience, but [in terms of] . . . the increase in attention for this channel and from where we started to where we are right now, I consider that a very, very big success."

Success isn't a simple concept to Weiner, though.

Take Don Draper, the slick but occasionally sentimental ad man who, we learned last season, had taken on another man's identity and hidden it from even those closest to him, only to find out that the exposure he'd most feared didn't actually matter.

"One thing that we know [about Don] is that he's damaged," Weiner said. "And that he has the profile, and he was created that way, of a success. And there's always a false self in success. It doesn't matter if you're an actor, or whatever you're doing. There's a false self. People invent themselves, it's part of the American myth, and it makes me very uncomfortable. I like to be completely exposed, which is just as embarrassing to people as being a liar."

Not all writers think as visually as Weiner, who considers himself "observant."

"My wife's an architect, and she can't stand that I'm a know-it-all," he said.

As for his eye for period details, the writer, who's in his early 40s, said, "I don't know how I know a lot of the stuff. I don't really question it. I've always had a good eye - I was a pain in the ass on every show I've ever been on. I've always been the guy who [would] complain about the gun. 'I said nickel-plated revolver. Where is it? . . . he owns a Laundromat, he should have a nickel-plated revolver.' And so I've always been specific about that stuff. Maybe I'm a frustrated designer."

He's equally specific about his characters, and though it's called "Mad Men," it's hard to imagine the show without Jones or Elisabeth Moss, who plays his secretary-turned-protégé Peggy Olson, or Christina Hendricks, who's Joan Holloway, the stern beauty who's Sterling Cooper's office manager.

The level of sexism depicted may appear jarring, but Weiner doesn't seem interested in creating any victims.

The house on which he and his crew have lavished such attention, "that's like a symbol of success. That's not supposed to be a gilded cage," he said. "It's sort of become this great tragic concept of the woman being out in the country, alone . . . [but] that job that Betty Draper has was the coolest job to have. She got out of college, she modeled, she married an incredibly handsome man, she got a car, she doesn't have to work, she has two children, she has hobbies, she has no responsibilities, she has money.

"That was the job. And the reality of the fact that she's alone in it, that was what was interesting to me." *

Ellen Gray is attending the Television Critics Association's meetings in Beverly Hills, Calif. Read more at go.philly.com/

ellengray or send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.