The 1950s are often evoked as a time when there's little crime, kids show respect, and everyone goes to church on Sunday. The funny thing is the 1950s weren't like that.Advertising"”whether it be for soap or cars or politics"”is not about the product, and not even about lifestyle, but about the life it portrays. As Don Draper, the ad executive in the AMC series Mad Men said to a big tobacco client looking for a way to avoid being tainted by emerging news linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, "Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."

At its best, advertising exploits a deep-seated human need for a better world. Wouldn't it be great if things could go back to the way things were.

It's funny how quite often the way things were is often an evocation of the 1950s. The idealized world of politician's platforms, and even the zoom-zoom Mazda minivan, come back to a cozy image of the sanctified nuclear family, free from fear, all doing okay: there's very little crime, the earth is unspoiled, kids dress better and show respect and everyone goes to church on Sunday and bowling on Wednesday.

The funny thing is the 1950s weren't like that. One of the best things that Mad Men, which finished its first season on AMC last week, did was reveal that era was not so much a bygone age as a foreign country to us today. Set at the Fin-de-Siècle of 1950s America in 1960 (before Kennedy's election) at a Madison Avenue ad agency, it's a sharply observed memoir of an age when everyone smoked, goulash was a gourmet dish ordered in restaurants and the film The Apartment was deemed inaccurate, not because of the sexual politics but because "No one but a black man would be an elevator operator."

It's really unnerving to watch the disconnect between our lives now and the lives then portrayed on the small screen. Kids clamber over the front seat of a car while its moving. Every executive's office has a well-stocked liquor cabinet. People crowd around a record player to listen to Bob Newhart's new comedy album as an event. A woman's contribution to the workplace is to find a man and then leave. Wives dismiss vacationing in the Catskills because there are "too many hooked noses."

It's completely foreign, and not necessarily better. Don Draper, the lead character, is a strong-and-silent Gary Cooper type who knows the power of image. And yet while he knows the essence of advertising is to convey you are okay, he is far from okay. Don is as contrived as his ad campaigns: his very identity was stolen from a dead superior officer in a freak accident during the Korean War and he's gone to great lengths to hide his poor rural upbringing as an unwanted child. He compartmentalizes this "”even paying off his brother to leave town"”like he compartmentalizes everything else: a nuclear family with an ignored and emotionally vulnerable wife and kids; multiple affairs with other women; a life in an ad agency where he's top dog because he holds practically everything in nihilistic contempt. By the end of the first season, Don is alone, the victim of a life where he's successfully pushed everyone away in one way or another.

The other character worth watching is Peggy, who has become Don's new secretary at the ad agency Sterling Cooper. On her first day, Peggy's briefing by her supervisor begins "He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time they're looking for something between a mother and a waitress." She then proceeds to critique everything Peggy's wearing on the grounds it's not attractive enough. It's eventually discovered that Peggy actually has a knack for writing ad copy but acknowledgment of her talent is grudging at best from the boys club running Sterling Cooper and it mystifies her female colleagues who think that a significant achievement isn't getting a national ad campaign but achieving some kind of peccadillo with one of the men. In the end, she is undone by her bad choices with men with the unlikeliest of consequences.

Mad Men shows the 1950s for what it is"”a time where humans are ultimately human, no matter what the trappings. Don's wife Betty quietly ossifies alone in suburban Ossining, New York. Never able to truly connect with anyone, her great betrayal comes when she discovers that Don is not having an affair but has been getting regular updates from her psychiatrist. At her next session, she suddenly becomes more honest than she's ever been before. Trapped as a housewife, she suddenly realizes the only way to for her to communicate her anger to her husband is to tell her shrink.

That's what I love about Mad Men. Like the films Far From Heaven and Hollywoodland, it tells the story of very ordinary and flawed people in an era when the rules are very different. In this season's finale, Don is pitching to Kodak a campaign for what will become their Carousel slide projector. His brother has committed suicide and he's refused to take part in Betty's parents thanksgiving and he realizes, all too late how unconnected he is even while he shows slides of his wife and kids and says, ""¦in Greek, nostalgia literally means "˜the pain from an old wound'. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone."

Perhaps that's the ultimate genius of Mad Men. It avoids the power of nostalgia to reconstruct a strange but similar world to ours that existed long ago. But at the same time it underlines why we all need nostalgia so badly.