All eyes on Hendricks at Mad Men 4 premiere

Christina Hendricks and Jon Hamm were at the fourth season premiere of 1960s drama Mad Men last night, as anticipation builds for Sunday's broadcast of the first episode of the new series.

Notable absentees from the evening, held at the Mann 6 Theatre in Los Angeles, were 35-year-old Hendricks's famous assets – she wore a disappointingly demure black lacey Dolce & Gabbana number (above) – and January Jones, who plays Betty, the wife of Don Draper, Hamm's character.

Sunday's first episode, which will be aired on US cable channel AMC, opens with the line. "Who is Don Draper?" As viewers of the first three seasons of Mad Men will know, he is actually Dick Whitman – but that's a long story.

It does, however, suggest that the complicated back story of Draper is one subject that series creator Matthew Weiner is not bored with. [Spoiler alert!]

After three series Weiner has had enough of Draper's rocky marriage to Betty and the Madison Avenue offices of Sterling Cooper, the ad agency where the action has so far been set.

Series four opens in 1964, one year on from the events of the season three finale, when the principal characters walked out on Sterling Cooper to set up a new ad agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, in a hotel bedroom. The new agency is now moving to new offices in the Time-Life building, part of the Rockefeller Centre. Meanwhile, Betty has divorced Draper and quickly remarried.

"These people are going to have a whole new set of problems, and it will keep me from repeating myself," says Weiner. "Why tell the same story again, about how bad Don's marriage is? We told that story. I also felt that we'd covered every inch and corner of Sterling Cooper's offices.

"As Don Draper says in the pilot, 'Fear stimulates my imagination'."

With no fewer than 17 Emmy Award nominations this year, the new series certainly has a lot to live up to. ·