WANTED: A FEW GOOD MEN: With barely a week left before the season finale of Mad Men, we’ve been reassured that the show has been renewed for a third season, though whether series creator Matt Weiner or any of the lead actors will be coming back is still up in the air.

According to a Fox News story, AMC and Lionsgate, the show’s network home and producers respectively, are frantically negotiating to get Weiner on board for season three, which is probably a big part of any deal they’ll have to make with Jon Hamm, John Slattery, or the rest of the show’s cast, none of whom apparently signed up past two seasons of what, back before it hit the air, was probably a neat but iffy-looking project.

“Hamm in particular poses a problem since he's turned into a huge break-out star,” the Fox News story speculates. “If Mad Men ended right now, the 36-year-old actor could go to movies and easily become the next George Clooney.” The latter sounds like a bit of a stretch; though Hamm has ably inhabited the enigma that is Mad Men’s Don Draper – this past Sunday’s episode certainly proved that – and is an undeniable factor in the show’s success, there’s no reason to believe his transition to the big screen is a sure thing.

The Fox News story probably had it right, however, when they stated that renegotiating Hamm’s contract is “going to cost them more than they've probably ever paid for anything.” The same goes for Weiner, though it might be overreacting to imagine that the odds are decent that AMC will come up short and end up sending Lionsgate to talk to another network – such as HBO, for instance, who would “pay just about anything to take it given their disappointing schedule right now.”

This might be undeniably true, but it just sounds like wishful thinking overall – HBO legendarily turned down the show before Weiner, a writer on HBO’s The Sopranos, took it to AMC, who were looking to get into the drama market. Acquiring Mad Men might give HBO its mojo back, though it might just as easily make the once-untouchable quality cable leader look like it’s been reduced to taking an upstart network’s sloppy seconds. In any case, it’s unlikely that AMC will give up the show that easily, and fall back on Breaking Bad as its marquee title, especially after the money they’ve invested in promoting the show over the summer.

I’ve despaired about the return of Mad Men for a third season before, but its survival has never looked more certain, even despite contingencies such as the (always reliable) greed of agents with the upper hand. Which is why it’s strangest of all for the Fox News piece to insist that the show’s plot lines will be mostly resolved this Sunday, “in case there aren't any more.” Sending all the characters and their ongoing issues to ground isn’t remotely possible at this point, and the idea that everyone involved would walk away from the show at this point suggests an eruption of fickleness and pique that not even Hollywood could manage in any but its most perverse moods.