Hard sell? Not at all

It was a good summer for “Mad Men,” AMC’s deceptively naturalistic fantasy of life in 1960 New York. A cocktail of romance, intrigue and really nice furniture set in the world of advertising, the series’ critical success has earned it a second season. They ran it up the flagpole, and it was saluted.

The first season finale airs this week. Things have been getting tense, in a low-boil way, around the offices of Sterling Cooper and at the suburban home of main Mad Man Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who is trying to find the right balance between his wife, his mistress and the woman he loves while holding down the lid on a boxful of inconvenient old secrets. For all its right-angled neatness, and notwithstanding the fact that advertising will go on to rule the Earth, “Mad Men” is a picture of a world about to crumble -- which is also to say a world on the verge of awakening.

“Those people in Manhattan? They are better than us,” secretary-turning-copywriter Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) tells a doubting date. “They want things they haven’t seen.”

Viewed from the far side of Selma, the Beatles, acid, Tet, Watergate, Stonewall, AIDS, cellphones, 9/11, Facebook and the $4 cup of coffee, the milieu of “Mad Man” can seem oddly more remote than that of “Rome” or “Deadwood” -- so near, yet so far. Creator Matthew Weiner has made something at once highly researched and deeply artificial -- a distillation of John Cheever, Look magazine, Alfred Hitchcock and Doris Day, acted with the deliberation of a Noh play. At its best, it’s the most poetical thing on TV.

(AMC, Thur., 10 p.m.)

-- Robert Lloyd