American television critics were breathless with anticipation last week as the second season of the drama series Mad Men began — and immensely relieved that the season premiere lived up to their incredibly high expectations. “Every bit as inspired as you have heard,” says Ray Richmond, of The Hollywood Reporter. “And getting better all the time.”

Mad Men, set in the luxuriant, retro dream world of a Madison Avenue ad agency on the cusp of the 1960s, was an instant critical hit when it began last year. It snagged 16 Emmy nominations, unheard of for a series in its first season, and won two Golden Globes: for best drama series, and for best actor, Jon Hamm. Hamm was the show’s breakout star, playing the archetypically tall, dark and handsome, but still mysterious and conflicted, advertising executive Don Draper.

Critics adored Mad Men’s guiltless immersion in an age before political correctness. Men — and women — wreathe themselves in cigarette smoke, in a time before people knew cigarettes led to wreaths. Three- martini lunches are de rigueur. Blatant sexism and casual racism are so ingrained as to seem almost quaint and innocent. Feminism is a notion barely formed in Betty Friedan’s mind. And America, still busting with pride from its triumph in the second world war, bestrides the world on the strength of its booming economy and with the righteous power of its ideas: freedom and 30 brands of washing powder. Those are forged into trenchant catch phrases at agencies such as Sterling Cooper, depicted in Mad Men.

What gives Mad Men an almost unbearable tension, a Chekhovian edge, is our knowledge that for America, and for the men so busily selling the idea of it in the series, the sense of existential certainty lasted for so brief a moment. We know it’s about to be shattered — by the tragedy of the Vietnam war, which is barrelling round a blind corner like an unstoppable tank; by the late-1960s counterculture, which will reject the values that led America into Vietnam; and by the attendant sexual revolutions, which will radically change the way men and women relate to each other.

The second season picks up the story two years on. It’s Valentine’s Day, 1962. Across New York, people are watching their black-and-white televisions as Jacqueline Kennedy gives a graceful tour of the White House, a residence we know she will live in for only a short time longer, before tragedy shatters her life, too. Using Jackie Kennedy as such a motif signals that, as the first season focused on the dilemmas and desires of the men at Sterling Cooper, the second will spend more time on the emerging psyches of the women — the wives, secretaries and lovers.

It’s now clear that Betty Draper, Don’s beautiful blonde wife, played by the lovely January Jones, is being groomed as a troubled Hitchcockian heroine in the Kim Novak or Tippi Hedren mould. In the new-season premiere, she begins tentatively to test just how powerful and potentially dangerous an instrument her seductive beauty and still unexplored sexuality might be.

“Betty Draper is getting angry,” explains Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator. “She is an incredibly beautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looks good on paper. She has realised that, when her beauty disappears, she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband and she doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified of dealing with that problem, because she cannot get divorced, she cannot be single, she cannot start over.” Like so many women at that time. There are also strong hints that Peggy, the secretary whom Draper has promoted to copywriter — who was shocked to find she was pregnant at the end of the first season — will also feature more insistently, though, tantalisingly, we learn nothing, at first, about the fate of her child.

As thrilling as it was to sit down last week to watch the beginning of the second season of a show that promises true greatness, there is a big problem with Mad Men: what The Hollywood Reporter’s Richmond calls the show’s “tragically low” ratings. If only someone would watch the thing,” he says. By the end of the first season of 13 episodes, Mad Men was averaging just 910,000 viewers on the cable channel AMC. Less than 1m viewers is hardly a blip on the radar when you consider that top-rated shows such as American Idol can hit 30m viewers a week, while House, starring Hugh Laurie, the top-rated drama series on American television these days, regularly pulls in 20m-plus. The first season of The Sopranos on HBO attracted an average of 4.3m viewers; its 2002 season premiere pulled 13.4m.

Some critics believe Mad Men’s dismal audience figures are symptomatic of a terminal decline in the taste of the American audience, which seems addicted to ridiculous reality series such as It’s Complicated, starring Denise Richards, former Bond girl and ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, and the new reality show featuring the horrifying stage mom Dina Lohan, mother of the actress Lindsay. More to the point, critics wondered how long AMC, a small cable channel, whose first scripted series this is, could sustain Mad Men if so few people tuned in.

AMC, gratified by the plaudits and prizes for the show’s first season, decided to double down and spend heavily promoting the new episodes — as much as $25m, according to some estimates. It seems to have paid off. Last Sunday’s opener doubled the show’s audience, pulling 1.9m viewers. While AMC and Mad Men aficionados were buoyed by the ratings, some observers doubt the show will ever be more than a critical hit. Brian Lowry, of Variety, believes that its “tranquil pace” means it “will likely struggle to significantly expand its commercial appeal, despite critical accolades”.

Unfortunately, Lowry may be right. Mad Men can be glacial. That is in startling contrast to the frantic shrillness, addiction to meaningless action and violence and insistent descent into sentimentality that are the hallmarks of just about everything else on American television these days. “There is little in the way of ‘action’,” says Robert Lloyd, television critic for the LA Times. “It is possibly the slowest, most deliberative show on television, which is one of the things that makes it so lovely and mysterious.” The most exciting thing to happen in the premiere was the arrival of Sterling Cooper’s first Xerox machine, a huge beast that nobody could figure out where to put.

Despite the acclaim for Mad Men, some interesting dissenting voices, particularly on the right, are beginning to be heard. Adam Simon, a film and television writer and cultural critic, agrees that Mad Men is beautifully executed, but says: “It is just too condescending. I really can’t bear the it is so certain that it, and by extension its viewers, are so morally and culturally superior to the characters we’re watching — in fact, to the whole era it depicts.

“You get to revel in the cool atmosphere while feeling smugly superior to it. Oh, so sexist, so racist, so anti-semitic. So desperately in need of the sexual and cultural revolution waiting round the corner. It feels cheap in that sense, allowing us to pat ourselves on our backs for merely living on the other side of the great awakening.”

Perhaps that’s what Man Men needs to attract more viewers — healthy controversy, not just acclaim.

Mad Men 2 begins in the UK in the new year

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