The formula for a post-Sopranos cable drama is as follows: find a group of people about whom viewers have well-formed and malignant ideas—polygamists (Big Love) or drug dealers (Weeds) will work—and zoom in until this formerly exotic subculture appears comic and banal, much like our own lives. Aside from the mob boss, few characters fit this treatment better than the tormented and maligned adman, who surfaces once again as the focus of Mad Men, AMC's new series from former Sopranos executive producer and writer Matthew Weiner.

The year is 1960, and Jon Hamm stars as Don Draper, the creative director at a Madison Avenue ad agency. He smokes. He drinks. He cheats. He has near-mystical bursts of inspiration about how best to manipulate the masses. These, understand, are the essential, terrifying marks of the Hollywood version of an adman. Draper, for all his occupational and emotion-less toils, is yet another mash-up of The Hidden Persuader and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The writing is sharp, but we've heard it before, and it's hard to take seriously—as the show seems to ask—after seeing send-ups of the era like Down with Love, The Hudsucker Proxy, or Far From Heaven. (The moments when Mad Men slips into broader satire—like when we find out that a cloistered trio of phone operators are the most important people in the building—are, in fact, the points at which it seems most original.)

The Sopranos, by peeling away the myth of the mafia kingpin as established by The Godfather and loosened up by Goodfellas made for compelling television. But the 50-year-old archetype of the adman refuses to budge, perhaps because without it there wouldn't be anything the least bit interesting about copywriters and art directors.—Jim Hanas