The series, tonight at 10, is set at that moment right before America woke up from the 1950s. Don and his co-conspirators at the Sterling Cooper agency are watching helplessly as the rules of their game change daily, as the culture wars -- over women's rights, diversity, divorce, health concerns -- begin to kick in.
But please don't think "Mad Men" is merely nostalgia. It's so much richer than that. The show is layered with still-resonant ideas, about the oppressive reign of bottled-up WASPS in ties, about whether love is, as Don puts it, "invented by guys like me to sell nylons." In the premiere, Don and his secretary-leering assistants have an explosive meeting with a newfangled threat -- de partment-store executive Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), who is both an aggressive woman and a Jew. While Don can condescendingly tell his sweet new secretary (Elisabeth Moss) to "go home, put your curlers in, and we'll get a fresh start tomorrow," he is thrown by Rachel.
Meanwhile, Don's boss, played with cagey charm by John Slattery, tracks down the firm's only Jewish employee, who works in the mailroom, and props him up at the Menken meeting for show.
The series gets only wittier in later episodes, when, in a darkly comic twist, Don, such a whiz selling cigarettes, is pressured to promote a young politician named Dick Nixon. The movie-centric AMC may seem like a strange home for such a provocative series, until you think about classics such as "Sweet Smell of Success," "The Apartment," or "Gentleman's Agreement." Like "Mad Men," they also draw dividing lines between innocence and civilized corruption, between the appearance of happiness and the reality of anxiety. They also give us intelligent men abusing power. "Mad Men" has the feel of an Elia Kazan morality tale.
