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LOS ANGELES, July 12 - Like a trusted Mafia lieutenant, Matthew Weiner helped suffocate Christopher Moltisanti in an S.U.V. and shoot Bobby Baccalieri in a model-train shop. He did so in his capacity as an executive producer of "The Sopranos," and he shared a writing credit on those particular episodes, and was listed as the sole writer on many others during the series's final three seasons.

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For his next act, Mr. Weiner, 42, has crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey to Madison Avenue and turned the clock back nearly 50 years to the late 1950s, where "Mad Men," the new dramatic series he has created, begins. It makes its debut on AMC on Thursday night at 10.

Though nobody is killed, at least early on, Mr. Weiner's lead character, an archetypal advertising man named Don Draper, is surrounded by a supporting staff of misogynistic executives who engage in enough lying, backbiting, drinking and sexual shenanigans during the industry's golden age to rival the bad behavior of the crew at the Bada Bing club.

There is also a disproportionate amount of spirited conversation in office hallways in the series's initial episodes - as if "The West Wing" had been restaged in a haze of cigarette smoke, among neat rows of desks topped with typewriters - though not necessarily a lot of action, beyond a low-speed car crash and some overt flirting.

"Talking can be heroic," Mr. Weiner said in an interview here on the studio set serving as Mr. Draper's living room, arrayed with linen drapes, needlepoint pillows and copies of Flair, the popular '50s magazine. "I loved 'The Sopranos.' But not every problem can be solved by killing someone. When you take that out of the mix, talking is kind of what you have left, although a lot of problems on this show are solved by sleeping with people."

The arrival of "Mad Men," which is being given an initial run of 13 one-hour episodes, comes at a particularly opportune time for both Mr. Weiner and AMC, the basic cable channel that is formally known as American Movie Classics. Mr. Weiner, whose previous writing experience was mostly on two network comedies, "Becker" and "The Naked Truth," wrote the pilot episode seven years ago, as a so-called spec script, Hollywood's version of a calling card. It so impressed David Chase, the creator of "The Sopranos," that he hired Mr. Weiner largely because of it.

"It was what you're always hoping to see," Mr. Chase said, calling from a post-"Sopranos" vacation in Europe. "It was lively and it had something new to say. Here was someone who had written a story about advertising in the 1960s, and was looking at recent American history through that prism."

Though Mr. Weiner mostly put the script for "Mad Men" aside to focus on "The Sopranos," he revived it last year as the series was winding down. That happened to be the very moment that AMC was searching for an idea for an original series that was cinematic in its ambitions - one that might complement the mix of older and newer movies ( including "Goodfellas" and "Something About Mary" this week) that are the channel's stock in trade.

In other words, AMC, which is operated by Rainbow Media, a unit of Cablevision, was looking to rip a page out of the HBO playbook, and wound up hiring one of that channel's star assistant coaches. And it didn't hurt that he had helped diagram the plays on the equivalent of a perennial Super Bowl champion.

"Matt's pedigree is second almost to none," said Charlie Collier, executive vice president and general manager of AMC. But in the end, it was Mr. Weiner's ability to transport himself and his audience to a period that predated his birth - in 1965 - that persuaded AMC to make his series.

Mr. Weiner, who studied philosophy, literature and history at Wesleyan University before receiving a master's degree from the University of Southern California film school, said he had always been fascinated by America, and New York City in particular, in 1959. That was not only the year his father, a neuroscientist, and mother, a law school graduate, got married, but was also the eve of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign, and all that it would usher in. (Mr. Weiner's sister, Allison Hope Weiner, is an occasional contributor to The New York Times.)

Long before he sat down to write the "Mad Men" pilot, Mr. Weiner had steeped himself in the culture of the 1950s and 1960s. He read Salinger, Cheever and Kerouac - as well as "Sex and the Single Girl" and "The Feminine Mystique" - and studied movies like "The Apartment" and "A Guide for the Married Man," a jarring treatise on the sexism of the time starring Walter Matthau and Robert Morse.

"The ad man was a national fascination," Mr. Weiner said. "And he came in various forms. He could be James Garner. He could be Rock Hudson. He could be Tony Randall. He could be Glenn Ford." Mr. Weiner went on to describe that character as "glib, cynical," as well as someone "who was overpaid, drank too much, smoked too much and had no respect for authority."

While that character would seem light years away from where Mr. Weiner was when he conceived "Mad Men" - a sitcom writer, he was 35, married to an architect, with three young children - Mr. Weiner said he could nonetheless relate to much of what he had learned about work and family in the late 1950s and early '60s.

"I was very happy, but I did have this sense about my life and where it was going, sort of like, 'Is this it? What's wrong with me? Why aren't I happier?' " he said. "That seemed to be a national point of view at this time."

Comparisons between "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" are probably inevitable - and even Mr. Weiner can't resist saying of his main character, "Don doesn't kill anyone - with his hands." Don does, however, seek advertising's equivalent of a "whack" when he schemes to fire a young rival. Also, perhaps in a homage to Mr. Chase's Dr. Melfi, Mr. Weiner has one of his disaffected characters seek extended counsel from a psychiatrist.

And yet, in casting his lead character, Mr. Weiner tilted more toward George Clooney than toward James Gandolfini, choosing Jon Hamm, a veteran supporting actor with matinee-idol looks. One of the richest supporting roles in "Mad Men" is that of Bert Cooper, an eccentric ad agency owner who pads around the office in stocking feet; for that role, Mr. Weiner drew inspiration from "Guide for the Married Man," and cast one of its stars, Mr. Morse, who is now, however improbably, 76.

Mr. Chase's contribution thus far has been that of an informal cheerleader. But the "Sopranos" creator, who knows something about endings, has an idea for the finale of "Mad Men," whenever it concludes its run.

"Well, it starts out, what, around 1959," Mr. Chase said. "I went through the blackout in New York in 1965. That might be a good way to go."



In short, it begins in 1959. The second season opens in 1962.