Mad Men: watch it

With The Wire and The Sopranos both essentially finished, a hole has been left in the TV schedule that needs to be filled with something of high quality. It is rare to see a programme that sucks you in immediately and gives you real hints that it may well be a bona fide classic, and that you are going to be talking about it alot with your TV-loving friends. The Wire was certainly a show that started strong and grew better and better as you became more engrossed in the characters, the plotlines and the politics of it all. Mad Men could well be the show to fill the considerable void left by these shows' departures.

The men in Mad Men (BBC4, Sunday. Repeated on BBC2 on Tuesdays) are so called because they're ad men and they work on Madison Avenue, centre of American advertising in the 1960s.
In the early '60s New York ad world, morality has not yet been invented and a thick cloud of smoke envelopes the sharp-suited, racist, sexist, drinking, smoking titular characters.
Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, was a writer on The Sopranos and the similarities are apparent even if the action has moved across the Hudson river, and nearly half a century back in time.

The characers are deliciously complex and are revealed to us slowly - Don Draper (John Hamm), a talented but tortured copywriter, is the main player, but other characters are coming to the fore as the series progresses, particularly the weaselly, snivelling Peter Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser). The impatient amongst you may download the first season from somewhere on the internet, but I'm going to be following it as the weeks go by, with every confidence that it is going to blossom, before my eyes, into a work of great importance in modern television. Another programme that does not pander to its viewers and is an adult work, brimming with snappy dialogue, startling period authenticity and with alot to say, not just about then, but also about now..