I think I can safely speak for my entire gender when I state categorically that all men would much rather be living in the 1950s. Why? You could drink like a fish, smoke anytime anywhere, treat women like dirt, and eat red meat three times a day. You could also be bigoted (racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic) and kick your pets around the house with no fear of recrimination. Life was great! You disagree? Obviously you haven't been watching the rollicking, almost giddy portrayal of that era on the television series Mad Men, which now begins its second season on AMC.

Though its first season was set in 1960, everyone knows the fifties lasted until either the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, or the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan on February 9, 1964. Mad Men's POV is pointedly fifties, from its cultural attitudes and three-button Brooks Brothers suits right down to the stiletto brassieres, elaborate crinolines, and acres of other undergarments women were required to wear. As the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, says, "I picked 1960 because it was the height of the 1950s." True to style and period, Mad Men's opening graphics feature a silhouetted businessman existentially falling to earth through a canyon of Mies van der Rohe–inspired office façades, a sequence reminiscent of the popular title designer of the period, Saul Bass. The opening music is one step away from Bernard Herrmann's North by Northwest score.

But much of the show's juiciness lies in the utter vileness of its characters — at least by today's standards. They would not be welcome guests on Oprah. They are not the wacky lovables of Desperate Housewives.

In case you've missed it, here's some of what's been going on at Sterling Cooper, Mad Men's Madison Avenue ad agency, circa 1960: Hunky and brilliant creative director Don Draper (played by the seriously chiseled Jon Hamm) has just saved the agency's Lucky Strike account by coming up with the innocuous slogan "It's Toasted." He deeply impresses the new boy, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a young and smarmy opportunist, as well as Roger Sterling, agency partner and philandering friend (brilliantly and hilariously played by John Slattery).

Don is incomprehensibly unfulfilled by his insanely beautiful ex-model wife, Betty (January Jones). While he carries on affairs with his beatnik mistress and the attractive head of a Jewish department store, Betty minds the children in the New York burb of Ossining (home of Sing Sing and John Cheever). She makes uneaten dinners for her husband, flirts with Freudian psychoanalysis, and smokes — sometimes even in the nursery. But everyone lights up in Mad Men; clouds of smoke decorate approximately half the scenes. My heart goes out to the actors who must by law smoke only herbal ciggies — thousands of them in this show — and don't even get to enjoy the pleasures of nicotine.

Back at Sterling Cooper, the Jayne Mansfieldian office manager, Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks, for whom the period-appropriate word would be stacked), has been having an affair with Roger. Don's new secretary, Peggy Olson (a very perky Elisabeth Moss), not only has a one-night stand with Pete — see above — on the eve of his marriage, but one more tryst with Pete overseen through translucent office windows by a janitor. One of these two events results in a pregnancy undetected not only by the office but by Peggy herself until she delivers the baby. (She also rises from secretary to copywriter.) To further emphasize how truly evil the characters are, it's an election year, and they're all for Nixon, not Kennedy.