It does Mad Men - a new US drama set in the world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s - a disservice to begin by talking about the amount of smoking it contains. But given that these days cigarettes are considered almost as pestiferous as the pox, it's impossible to ignore: every single character, without exception, is continually chugging away. The fictional advertising agency Stirling Cooper is a hazy, tar-stained place, and if the world Mad Men creates wasn't so completely convincing, it might look as if the writers were trying to make a point. But, instead, it reminds us that in New York in 1960 this is just what people did.

The same goes for the drinking, the misogyny, the anti-Semitism and the racial gibes. They are all so completely of-a-piece with the surrounding milieu that, after an episode or two, they become part of the socio-cultural furniture. It makes for some uneasy viewing, in a weird place between abhorrence and nostalgia.

Playing ping-pong with our memories of things past in this way is a trick that's become fashionable on television recently, most notably in the BBC's Life on Mars and its follow-up Ashes to Ashes. But where those two series play it for laughs, and sugar the pill with plenty of wham-bam action scenes, Mad Men is a much more subtle piece. It centres around Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at Stirling Cooper. A war hero with a 1950s movie-star mien, Draper has one foot firmly in the past, but as a brilliant ad man and a survivor, he also has one eye on adapting for the future.

The team that he assembles around him, from his fledgeling secretary Peggy (Elizabeth Moss, aka President Bartlet's daughter Zoey in The West Wing) to the unctuous tyro Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) all have their own secrets and fears. In the first few episodes very little happens. Instead, Mad Men takes exquisite care to ground the viewer in the sights, aesthetic and mores of a particular moment in time. When it launched in America last year, Mad Men was the single stand-out critical hit, hailed as being an entirely original immersion in America's not-so-distant past. It won Best Drama at this year's Golden Globes, with Hamm taking the Best Actor award.

“I placed it very specifically,” says the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, who worked as a producer and writer on The Sopranos. He cites the idiom of Salinger and John Cheever as well as movies such as The Apartment and Cash McCall as influences. Of course, 1960 was the year that John F. Kennedy was elected. But Weiner is trying to show how America remained as divided as ever. “There's always a counter-culture in the United States. The election of John F.Kennedy has been historically metabolised as this assertion of youth and hope - the truth is that election was decided by a very small percentage of the country; half the country did not vote for him.”

Also, 1960 was a very important year for advertising. In the third episode Don and his masters-of-the-universe discuss Doyle Dane Bernbach's famous campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, which used headlines such as “Think Small” and “Lemon” to sell Americans a little car that couldn't have been more different from the cocksure gilded beauty of a 1960 Cadillac.

“Advertising had just begun to change,” says Weiner. “The Volkswagen ad is really revolutionary. It has a subversive quality that's based on honesty, humour, and it's talking to the consumer.” That went entirely against the prevailing postwar mood, where people had implicit trust in the genius of American manufacturing, and had come to believe what they were told about each great new advance. Because Mad Men uses advertising as a metaphor for identity - are you how you present yourself to other people, or is the hard-sell just there to cover up your faults as a product? - watching Draper and co struggling to come to terms with a new type of advertising goes hand in hand with watching them face up to the climactic change that the 1960s was to bring.

“Dramatically speaking I liken it to the Titanic,” says Weiner. “Why do people watch that movie? Everybody knows how it ends. But there is some pleasure in seeing people struggling to survive when the catastrophe happens, and there's also some intrinsic drama in people walking around talking about how safe the ship is. That's really what I'm doing.”

With the current American presidential election candidates talking of “change” to the point where it's become a blah-blah bromide, Mad Men has very cleverly stationed itself at another cultural crossroads. Everyone is teetering on the brink; they just don't quite know it yet.

Mad Men, Sunday, BBC Four, 10pm; Tues, BBC Two, 11.20pm

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