Does this sound familiar? A president has just been elected on a pretty much 50:50 split vote, so you would expect America to be divided.

But there’s something different about this guy. He’s young, and he represents change. After the election, you look at the polls, and this smart, sharp-looking man with a great education and modernising ideas has somehow grabbed the national mood. His approval ratings are about 80%. Everyone wants to know, what’s it going to be like in this new America? How will we live? What will we feel? There are terrible threats to the order of things, an enemy looms overseas and social change is clearly on the way.

Matthew Weiner, the creator Mad Men, the planet’s coolest television drama, always said his show was “as much about history as it is about the human history, the stages in your life”. Its second season, which begins on BBC4 next month, feels so damn close to history that parts of it could be a documentary of our times. After season one’s mayhem, the action has jumped forward 15 months and we find ourselves in 1962. Kennedy is in power, “Camelot” reigns supreme, the civil-rights movement is under way and the white, male masters of the universe are starting to stumble as society’s tectonic plates shift beneath them.

The first series of Mad Men broke slowly, launched on an American cable movie channel called AMC, which had never really made its own shows before, and what first slid this drama into the skulls of journalists and viewers alike was its look. Flick through reviews and interviews at the beginning of Mad Men and you find — irrespective of nation or continent — a slavering hunger for the sharp suits, heavy drinking and constant smoking that form its stylistic core. It’s as if an orally deprived planet, condemned as gluttons to the third circle of Hell, was gorging vicariously on the sensual pleasures of the living.

Last year’s story lines played with subtle hints that the hard-drinking, fast-talking executives at New York’s Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper were about to see their world collapse. “In the pilot, I say, ‘I’m not going to let a woman talk to me like that. Are you crazy? Are you literally insane?’ ” recalls Jon Hamm, the square-jawed actor with matinée-idol looks who plays Sterling Cooper’s creative superstar, Don Draper. “It’s jarring to us, because that’s the most politically incorrect thing in the whole show. But to him, it was as if the dog had started talking — it’s like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

For Draper and his buddies in season two, the dog is no longer just talking, it’s pretty much learning to play the piano. “The year 1962 was a time when people’s comfort had increased and they were starting to investigate other things,” Weiner explains. “You can tell what was on people’s minds from the books coming out — Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, The Affluent Society and Unsafe at Any Speed. Issues of the environment, women’s lib, poverty, civil rights and the corporate agenda of America are big parts of what became the political and social change of the 1960s, and I really wanted to focus on that. There was a sense of the end of the world as we know it, not just from a nuclear threat, but from all these things we’d gotten used to. That was true then, and it certainly feels like the environment we have now.”

Hamm adds: “If you were white and male in the United States, and were wealthy and had a good job, you could do whatever you wanted. At the beginning of the 1960s, that started to erode, and they were all aware of it. That crazy conservative backlash that gave us Nixon was their response — ‘Whoa, we are losing our grip on our domain to women and minorities.’ The era of the strong white guy was slipping. This, too, shall pass. This was the tipping point between Eisenhower’s post-war golden age and Vietnam. It was the breaking point.”

This growing mood insinuates its tendrils into the slowly crumbling bedrock of last season’s foundation — although, as befits a drama penned by a former Sopranos scribe, the relationships and roles in Mad Men take a little time to unpick, so a little revision may be useful. Hamm’s Draper, the creative brains of the agency, is married to Betty, a beautiful ex-model whose struggle with the suburban horror of powerless motherhood is neatly played by January Jones. Don was born Dick Whitman, and stole his identity. He has lied his way into the American dream, only to find it strangely boring once he gets there.

Around him dance the agency staff — Peggy, the new girl at the start of series one, who is the first out of the typing pool and into the creative department, but coping with an unexpected pregnancy as the result of a fling with the account guy Pete Campbell. Campbell knows Draper’s dark secret, but, seeing as he’s married, the whole pregnancy thing comes as a bit of a shock to him. Then there’s the glamourpuss Joan, whose name is above the door because it’s daddy who founded the agency.

In season two, the whole Sterling Cooper crew finds itself tossed uncomfortably by the stormy culture of the real world. The careless living we fell in love with begins to cost them. One — say it ain’t so — loses his job because of his heavy drinking. Others lose their grip: on their marriages, on their identity and on the purpose of their lives.

“Series one was all about hedonism, but in series two the world has changed,” Weiner says. “The social constructs are changing — young people are becoming the financial focus of the culture, women are taken seriously as consumers. Don Draper has to let Peggy handle pitches because clients want this young energy. That’s what a lot of episode one is about, and you feel it through the whole season — there’s this crudeness to the world.”

As such, it’s pretty much perfect recession television. Swap old school admen for overambitious City boys dropping the ball on mortgage derivatives and this is a 13-part dose of schadenfreude. Weiner even shoots New York greyer and darker — part of the point of the 1960s, he argues, is that it began the city’s decline, until, by 1972, it was a violent, crime-ridden disaster area, while California hosted America’s dreams. Weiner is going big on symbolism with his characters, too. At the start of series two, for instance, Betty Draper is learning to ride a horse — in a faintly clumsy metaphor for sexual womanhood. This is underlined heavily when she struggles with the idea of her daughter mounting the surging stallion.

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