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”This place,” observes Don Draper, creative director of the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper, “has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.” It is 1960, and although the Sterling Cooper staff may have failed as artists and intellectuals, as ad men they are masters of the universe. And that is exactly why they were all invented by Matthew Weiner for his television-drama series Mad Men. It was, Weiner has said, “an amazing year”, and advertising was an amazing business. “The truth is, I think an advertising agency is one of the last places in the world where, if you bring in a big client, you’re in charge. There’s complete mobility, and it’s a model for the United States.”

The year is crucial. Nixon is about to lose to Kennedy, and America is feeling pretty good about herself. They liked Ike, the paranoia of the immediate postwar years had begun to subside and the suburbs had become happy havens of prosperity, and, for when they weren’t, the tranquilliser Librium, the Prozac of the age, had just come on the market.

Best of all, the year before, the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) had produced what was, in 1999, to be voted the greatest ad campaign of all time. It nicknamed Volkswagen’s little car the Beetle and showed it almost lost in a blank white page, with the slogan “Think Small”. Everything about this ad went against conventional wisdom: it wasted space, it sold a car as small when Americans liked big and it gave it an apparently demeaning name. Yet it turned Volkswagen into one of the world’s biggest car-makers. The concept of the ad man as a creative genius, not just a salesman, had been born.

He was also world-transforming. The idea that capitalism needs the manipulation of the mass mind to ensure that people will buy products even when - or especially when - they don’t need them was an old one, even by then. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, had sold the subconscious as the malleable source of all our impulses to the Americans in the 1920s. Deliberately influencing the subconscious was not only good for business, it was, claimed Bernays, necessary for the workings of democracy. Advertising and public relations soothed and managed the rage, aspirations, suffering and happiness of the masses.

Amid the relative peace and absolute prosperity of the 1950s, this was an idea whose time had come. Democracy and the good life meant consumption - something we could do much better than the Soviets. In order to consume, you needed to be told what to consume. Advertising would win the cold war. No wonder Weiner’s Mad Men think they are the centre of the world. They are.

Weiner wrote his first script for the series seven years ago and sent it to David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. Chase at once hired him to work on The Sops. Then, with that show finally out of the way, Weiner was free to go back to Mad Men. First aired in America in July last year, it has already picked up two Golden Globes and several other awards.

Apart from a few old ad men grumbling “It wasn’t like that”, the series has been universally acclaimed. But what, exactly, it’s about is puzzling. There are two views. Most of the American coverage has focused on how different Weiner’s 1960 seems from the way we live now. It is a costume drama, a period piece. On the other hand, Weiner himself has insisted that this is not merely a condescending look back at a quaint and distant past. “You tell me if this is a period piece,” he has said. “The men are asking, ‘Is this it?’ The women are asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ You tell me if that sounds like it’s 1960 or 2007.” Mad Men is not a window onto the past, it’s a mirror of the present. It’s the tension between these two views that makes the show so enthralling.

It’s a tension within Weiner himself, for the truth is he’s being more than a little disingenuous in denying the period quality of the show. In fact, Mad Men bends over backwards to draw your attention to the differences between then and now. “There were seven deadly sins practised at the dawn of the 1960s,” wrote Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “Smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism and racism. In its first few minutes, Mad Men... taps into all of them.”

Weiner plainly delights in shocking us with the sights and sounds of a different world. A Jewish client is a big problem for the agency - they have to seek out the one Jew they employ to make her feel at home. They hit the booze tray from late morning onwards. Gays are invisible, in the closet; and the girls are grateful there are men at IBM smart enough to design an electric typewriter simple enough for women to use. The perception of risk is downright weird. A little girl walks in with a plastic laundry bag over her head and gets told off by her mother for messing up her wardrobe.

But the really big shockers are the cigarettes. Everybody smokes all the time, including a doctor while conducting a gynaecological examination. When the hands of the hero, the creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), are in shot, they’re holding a fag; when they’re not, his trousers appear to be on fire. One of the agency’s top accounts is Lucky Strike, and this presents the ad men with a problem. Reader’s Digest - which, another period touch, everybody reads - has said smoking causes cancer, and the authorities won’t allow agencies to claim there are safer brands.

“Four out of five dead people smoke your brand,” is not, Draper observes, the best possible caption. But Draper is brilliant, up there with the DDB VW team. He gets round the death problem by saying of the tobacco in Luckies, “It’s toasted!”. All cigarette tobacco is toasted. But so what? It’s a nice, warm, safe word.

Draper’s monstrous genius is, in fact, too big to be locked in the ad world of 1960. Flogging Luckies as toasted may be quaint. But he is also looking after the Right Guard deodorant account. In a moment of subtle drama, he is lying in bed after being told by his mistress he stinks, asking himself Freud’s old question: what do women want? He gets it in one - “Any excuse to get closer” - and a brand is born. The Right Guard slogan, with its psychological intimacy and authenticity, is way ahead of its time. Authenticity was to take over from domestic comfort and bourgeois aspiration as the central advertising theme in the later, summer-of-love 1960s.

But the twist in the tale of all this period detail is the same as the twist in our own Life on Mars: in some fundamental sense, “then”, for all its faults, seems more attractive than “now”. At one level, this is simply about the gorgeous look of the show. The styling derives its power from the hard-surfaced abstraction of the architecture and interior design of the time. A book could be written on the credit sequence alone, with its overtones of Saul Bass, Hitch-cock and Scorsese, and its use of silhouetted linearity. It’s all about alienation, of course, but it’s beautiful and as eerily romantic as the deep-buttoned booths and vodka gimlets in the restaurants.

The clothes, meanwhile, are not just good, they are downright catwalk-fashionable. Ever since the unstructured 1980s, men’s suits have been getting sharper, to the point where the average male silhouette is now more or less back where it was in 1960. Women, meanwhile, have been racing back to what The New York Times’s Ruth La Ferla calls the “meticulously tailored look that evokes the White House of Jacqueline Kennedy”. She adds: “Some of Seventh Avenue’s most influential taste-makers are invoking in their latest collections the proprieties, the seamless appearances and the toney aspirations of midcentury Middle America. They are, in short, going bourgeois to the core.”

La Ferla quotes an art director, Sam Shahid: “Things are timeless right now ...” But then he adds, with deadly poignancy: “Or you want them to be.” So, like the 1970s in Life on Mars, 1960 in Mad Men is being seen as both horrifying and seductive. Draper’s wife is going mad in suburbia, but she looks great while she’s doing it, and so, come to that, does suburbia.

It would, however, be a big mistake to see Mad Men as a prolonged wallow in moral dismay and fashionista nostalgia. I know exactly why Weiner insisted this wasn’t a period piece. Primarily, like Chase in The Sopranos, he wants us to be objective. This involves denying us any easy moralising about the characters. Tony Soprano, like Don Draper, does what he does, and, if we keep stepping back and judging, we won’t understand.

In fact, this antimoralistic, high-objectivity stance is now all over the best American television. Both the great current cop shows, The Wire and The Shield, work, not because of simple amorality, but because of a deep awareness that no consistent moral posture can ever work. By setting his Mad Men amid the alien mores of 1960, Weiner distances them, making us watch them as if they were goldfish in a bowl of plate glass and stainless steel. We see them in a little world, they see themselves as the whole world; and, in doing so, we realise that we might also be goldfish. Like Brecht, Weiner understands that emotional distance - alienation - can intensify our engagement with what is really going on.

And finally, there is the whole issue of work itself. The Office, in both its American and British versions, and Joshua Ferris’s highly successful novel Then We Came to the End have indicated a strong contemporary awareness of the oddity of the working - specifically the clerical - life. What was banal has suddenly become exotic. Mad Men goes back to the time when the modern office, with its cubicles, geometric furniture and translucent glass, was born. It revels in the drama this creates. A refused handshake becomes, in this stark, demanding environment, a terrible frozen moment. And there’s a wonderful shot down the facade of the building, the stainless-steel mullions diving down towards the suited figures scurrying into the entrance.

The office had become the great exposer of all human weakness, as well as the centre of all human power. And advertising had begun its long march to world domination. It was 48 years ago, but it seems like tomorrow.

www.bryanappleyard.com

Mad Men starts on BBC4 tonight at 10pm

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