It’s not the 1950s (we know what they were like), yet it’s not quite the 1960s either (we definitely know what they were like). Instead, the setting for this Thursday’s opening episode of “Mad Men,” a new series on AMC set in the advertising industry, is 1960, the opening year of a momentous decade that had yet to open its eyes, yawn, and scratch its belly, let alone burn its bra or stage a be-in.

It was a stroke of genius on the part of “Sopranos” writer Matthew Weiner to select this most orphaned of years to explore the last gasps of WASP hegemony, when, to quote one of his frenzied New York advertising executives, people were “living one way and secretly thinking the exact opposite,” even if they had yet to realize it.

Of course, the success of “Mad Men” will depend, at least to some extent, on whether its creator, Mr. Weiner, avoids easy retrospective moralizing about America before civil rights, gay rights, feminism, rock ‘n’ roll, drugs, the anti-war movement, and a dozen other seismic waves that shook society to its foundation and changed America forever.

Mr. Weiner’s ad men (“mad men” is a term they’ve coined to describe themselves, with more than a touch of pride) are the cocksure masters of a universe that’s about to implode, explode, and then slide down a black hole lined with psychedelic wallpaper. We know that, they don’t, so we look upon them with a kind of wonder, as if they were all about to be struck by lightning. They’re not unlike the insurance agents of Billy Wilder’s great 1960 movie, “The Apartment,” except that in this case every frame is bathed with a patina of hindsight.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the owner of a Purple Heart and the creative director of the Sterling Cooper ad agency, where women are “girls,” Jews are in the mailroom, if anywhere (Jews have their own agencies), and his boss wants him to work his advertising magic on a promising presidential candidate: “Consider the product,” he tells Don. “He’s young, handsome, and a Navy hero. It shouldn’t be too difficult to convince Americans Dick Nixon is a winner.”

For the hero of a TV show, Don is on the unfashionable side of an awful lot of impending culture wars, and that’s part of what makes him interesting. It’s not just the matter of his potentially working for Nixon rather than Kennedy. There’s also the fact that one of his most important advertising accounts is for Lucky Strikes, and this at a time when a government report has just conclusively stated that cigarettes are bad for you. He is uneasy about women in positions of power; a meeting with Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff ), the stylish, sassy new head of a Jewishowned department store, turns nasty when she refuses to kowtow to his assumed masculine superiority.

You look at Don and think: Where’s this guy going to be in 1967? Will he be part of the disaffected “silent minority” or will he have grown his hair and laced his cigarettes with marijuana?

But it’s not quite so simple as that. Don sympathizes with a black waiter being bullied by his white boss, has a free-spirited mistress, and is surely aware that his art director, Salvatore, is homosexual without caring about it too much one way or the other. In short, he’s a complicated figure, at least as much shadow as light, and Mr. Hamm does a terrific job of endowing him with a cynic’s loner mystique. “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons,” he sneers at a woman. “Is that right?” she parries coolly. “Pretty sure about it,” he replies. The sad thing is that he does appear sure about it, even if we suspect that’s soon going to change.

There’s no way to know where this 13-part series is leading on the basis of one episode, but Mr. Weiner easily takes care of the essentials, filling out his canvas with confident, preparatory strokes. First he gets us interested in all the main characters and their percolating story lines, and he does so remarkably quickly. Not just with Don, but also with Rachel, who’s already years ahead of the business game mentally but has to wait for the guys to catch up. Then there’s Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), Don’s sneaky young rival who’s not shy about his plans for Don’s job, but seems too green and overreaching to get it. Slightly less successful as a character, or at any rate more difficult to read, is Peggy (Elizabeth Moss), Don’s new secretary, whose introduction to the office also introduces us to the distaff side of the Sterling Cooper ad agency.

The period details are humorously handled. “Now try not to be intimidated by all this technology,” says Peggy’s minder on her first day, taking the cover off a giant IBM Selectric typewriter. At another point someone says, “It’s not like there’s some magical machine that makes identical copies of things!” Mr. Weiner cleverly uses such devices to distance us from his chosen era, even as he draws us further into it. He wants us to inhabit two time frames simultaneously: the characters’ and our own. We’re constantly reminded that these “modern” Americans (as they call themselves) are in many ways hopelessly old-fashioned, even alien, to us. Yet the tone is not condescending.

There’s a particularly delicious cameo by Gordana Rasovich as Dr. Greta Guttman, the company researcher, who has taken an interest in how Don is going to sell the public on cigarettes now that they’ve officially been labeled lethal. Her idea: Go with the danger. Listening to her talk, you wish there were more women like Dr. Guttman in offices today.

“Before the war, when I studied with Adler in Vienna,” she tells Don in her thick German accent, “we postulated that what Freud called the death wish is as powerful a drive as those for sexual reproduction and physical sustenance.”

“Freud, you say. What agency is he with?”

In fact, Don’s last-minute inspiration for a winning new slogan for Lucky Strikes is one of the highlights of the episode, as well as a lesson in advertising hucksterism. Equally entertaining is the sight of a smoke-filled boardroom filled with cigarette addicts dismissing the new health warnings just as they all collapse into a coughing fit. It’s not often you watch the first episode of a series and immediately decide you’re going to stick around for the whole thing, but “Mad Men” will hook you from the opening scene.

bbernhard@nysun.com