With the Emmys behind us—and what a nice surprise to have been royally entertained for a change—now the fun really begins. Monday marks the start of the official premiere week, with new and returning shows everywhere you look (including on our poor, overworked DVRs).

Here are some thoughts on tonight’s line-up, and a few reflections on one of the most astonishing episodes yet of Mad Men, which just happened to air against the Emmys during the hour when the show won most of its awards.

First off, Monday’s main event finds three two-hour shows butting heads: the TV-movie-style House opener on Fox, the premiere of a splashy new season of Dancing With the Stars, with Tom DeLay, Kelly Osbourne and Donny Osmond among the are-you-kidding contestants, and for those who still care, a new season of NBC’s Heroes beckons.

Only House was available for preview, and here’s how I wrote about it in TV Guide Magazine:

Has Dr. House finally met his match? It’s a meeting of the brilliantly analytical minds, and a master class in acting, when Hugh Laurie clashes with Andre Braugher as a crafty but also damaged psychiatrist who holds the key to House’s future, in House’s tremendously entertaining and ultimately moving two-hour sixth-season opener.

It plays like a movie: “House Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a self-contained journey through House’s tortured mind, an attempt to break down his melancholy defenses as he goes into detox at a psych ward, only to be told (as if we didn’t know) that “Your issues run deeper than Vicodin.” The episode runs the emotional gamut: humor, tragedy, even a fleeting romance. Naturally, there’s a medical puzzle to solve along the way as House defies authority (as usual) before learning to ask for help: “I’m sick of being miserable,” he says.

Really? Is a happy House even possible, and would there still be a show? All reason enough to tune in for what’s promising to be another strong season.

(Why promising? I’m very encouraged by news that we’ll be seeing more of the original team. Just don’t look for them in this episode. This stand-alone story is all about House, with only one fleeting appearance by another regular cast member. Think of it as a bridge between seasons and hope for the best.)

Also on Monday:

Liked Neil Patrick Harris as Emmy host? Enjoy him even more in his natural element, as love-puzzled Barney Stinson, in a first-rate How I Met Your Mother season opener that deserves to be compared with the very best of Friends. (Airs 8/7c.) When Lily insists Barney and Robin define their relationship, they both resist: “We kept trying to have the talk, and then we realized we hate the talk,” Robin says. Much more funny talk ensues.

Which is more than I can say for the new sitcom that follows, Jenna Elfman's shrill and strident Accidentally on Purpose (8:30/7:30c), in which she plays a newspaper writer whose one-night-stand with a baby-faced young-un leads to predictable complications when she gets, you guessed it, knocked up. This reminds me of all those dreadful Sandra Bullock movies I get to skip, thanks to not being a movie critic. Even Elfman’s own real-life pregnancy doesn’t make this one more interesting.

Finally, how much did I want The Big Bang Theory to celebrate its move behind Two and a Half Men with a win at the Emmys for Jim Parsons? (Maybe next year the show will have grown enough that the academy won’t be able to ignore him.) As the third season opens (9:30/8:30c), the geniuses are back from the Arctic, but things get chilly between Sheldon and his pals when some unpleasant facts get thawed out. Making matters worse: They missed Comic-Con and the Star Trek movie while they were away! My favorite line, as Penny tries to console Sheldon: “Based on your current efforts to buoy my spirits, do you truly believe that you were ever fit to be a cheer leader?” I’m cheering for this show, and its brilliant star, all the way to next year’s Emmys.

Finally, some thoughts about Sunday’s remarkable episode of Mad Men, which could very well net the show another win in the writing category a year from now. “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency” was so full of incident, so rich in great moments, that it’s hard to know where to start.

But let me quote Joan, in that wonderfully tender scene in the hospital with Don, all pretenses and mannerisms shed as they talk to each other like equals: “That’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary’s running you over with a lawn mower.” Has this show ever had a shocking (and shockingly funny, if grisly) set piece like the bloody disaster that ensues when a drunken Lois cripples the newly installed and unctuous British COO Guy MacKendrick, mangling his foot with the John Deere tractor-mower that Cosgrove brought into the office, spraying onlookers with a geyser of gore. Joan, whose farewell party this helped ruin, takes immediate charge, ordering up a tourniquet and saving Guy’s life if not his foot. This jaw-dropping calamity leads to two of the funniest lines in Mad Men history.

First, as Joan and Don confront the British bosses at the hospital, one laments how this has effectively destroyed the promising career of this prodigy of an accounts man. “The doctors said he’ll never golf again.” Ouch. Meanwhile, back in the wrecked office, Roger gets his revenge on the twit who left his name off Sterling-Cooper’s new organization flow chart. When told Guy may lose his foot, Roger muses, “Right when he got it in the door,” chuckling Double ouch! With a classic exit line to boot: “Believe me, somewhere in this business this has happened before.” All of which means that Lane Pryce isn’t being shipped off to Bombay after all. But what an awakening he’s had about his soulless colleagues from across the pond: “I feel like I just went to my own funeral. I didn’t like the eulogy.” Something tells me his gratitude to Joan will extend beyond paying for her ruined dress. With her pathetic husband having been passed over for residency, she won’t be leaving Sterling Cooper after all. Let’s hope.

What didn’t happen in this episode? One brilliant, memorable, quotable scene after another. As many had already surmised, “Connie” from Don’s earlier country club encounter was actually Conrad Hilton, the hotel mogul and Time cover boy, who calls Don in for a free consult. Seeing greatness in Don (who doesn’t?), Connie tells him to “think bigger” than just landing his business, but Don—citing the parable of a hungry snake who suffocates while gorging—cautions, “One opportunity at a time.”

Other great office moments:

During the reorganization meeting (where Roger’s name isn’t even on the chart), Guy cites “Mr. Cosgrove” as head of accounts, along with “Mr. Campbell … for the present” (Pete’s alarmed raised eyebrow is priceless). After it’s over, Harry’s all “What the hell just happened?” and a disgruntled Pete has to inform him, “They reorganized us and you’re the only one in this room who got a promotion.” Harry: “Really?” Maybe Harry is perfect for TV after all.

So much for Don getting the nod, as Cooper had predicted, to join the London operation. (And so much for Betty’s fantasy of a pram and a real nanny.) Maybe he’s truly ready to hear what Connie has to offer.

Peggy thanking Joan in her own way at Joan’s going-away: “We can’t all be you.” Joan to Peggy: “Be that as it may, I do take some credit for your success here.” As well she should. But no time for sentiment. Lois is about to run over Guy’s foot and take down an office wall!

The episode is just as pungent, if not as bloody, on the Draper home front, as we get to the core of little Sally’s trauma over the death of her grandpa Gene and her unease over the new baby bearing his name. She asks dad for a night light: “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when you turn off the lights.” Later, we see Sally refuse to come into the bedroom where Betty is having a lie-down with baby Gene. Betty’s appalling parenting skills are once again spotlighted, as she tells her bored son Bobby to go bang his head against a wall: “Only boring people are bored.” Sending them out to play, she turns back to her “little pig in a blanket.” Even more soul-crushing is the scene where Betty gives Sally the gift of a Barbie “from baby Gene,” and in the coldest tone imaginable, tells the unnerved little girl, “He wants to be your friend and you are very important to me, too.” Where is the love?

Poor, forlorn Sally. The heart breaks, and the blood curdles when she wakes up screaming that night to find the Barbie she’d tossed in the bushes back on her dresser (retrieved by an unknowing Don). Daddy once again comforts her, while Betty can only growl, “I don’t even know what to say,” when the sight of mother and infant sends her shrieking again. And yet Betty has plenty to say when Don tells her the root of the problem. “She’s a child. She’ll get over it. Now you have to,” says Betty of keeping her father’s memory alive by naming the baby in his honor. Don’s response: “He hated me and I hated him. That’s the memory.” It may be summer of 1963, but the temperature’s freezing in this bedroom.

Thankfully, this breathless episode ends on a warmer note of conciliation, as Don takes the baby in his arms and Sally on his lap and says of the family’s new arrival: “We don’t know who he is yet or who he’s going to be, and that’s a wonderful thing.”

If anyone’s an expert on the mysteries of identity and the possibilities of self-invention, it’s Don Draper. But oh how I fear for this next generation of Drapers. Maybe baby Gene will make it through unscathed, but I’m not counting on it.