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Tavis: Jon Hamm stars in one of this summer's most talked-about new television series, "Madmen." The show is the creation of one of the executive producers and writers from "The Sopranos" and tells the story of Madison Avenue advertising execs back in 1960. It airs Thursday nights at 10:00 on AMC. Here now, a scene from "Madmen."

[Clip]

Tavis: Look at that Jon Hamm - he's smooth, he's smooth.

Jon Hamm: It's a lot easier when they write the words for you, you know what I mean?

Tavis: (Laughs) You okay?

Hamm: Yeah. It's a lot easier when they spell it all out for you and you get those great speeches.

Tavis: I was hoping you were going to wear one of those really nice suits, and see if I could talk you out of it today, man. The wardrobe is pretty slick on this show.

Hamm: Our costume designer, Janie Bryant, that's all vintage. It all comes from this big costume shop up in the Valley somewhere, and they're all - they're the suits that my dad wore, they're the suits that your dad wore - everybody's dad wore, and they just cut them and they make them right - they fit to you. And she does an amazing job on it. But they knew how to dress back then, they definitely did.

Tavis: Let me put you on the spot. What, in doing the role, have you most discovered about that era that kind of shocked you? I got my own list, but when I've seen the show I'm like wow, that was going on back then? That's how they behaved back then?

Hamm: Yeah, I think that is a big part of it. I think growing up - I grew up in the seventies and eighties in the Midwest.

Tavis: We both did.

Hamm: Yeah. And you had this popular sort of idea of what happened in the fifties and sixties as a sort of golden era in American culture. Everything was great and we'd just won World War II and it was - IBM and all these big corporations were really going, and there was just - the American dream was sort of at its height, and that's how it was presented by a lot of the people, like the character I play.

And when you really look at it what you really find out - and this is what I think, getting to your question of what surprised me the most, is that people weren't this sort of perfect, happy American citizen. They had doubts and fears -

Tavis: The good old days weren't so good.

Hamm: The good old days weren't so good. You had doubts, you had fears, you had anxiety - you had all this stuff, and it's a lot of the same stuff we're dealing with as quote, unquote, modern Americans today. You have to remember that those people thought they were as modern as they could get. They had all the newfangled machinery and all that stuff. You just replace all that stuff with Internet or AOL or whatever you wanna replace it with and it's very similar to today.

Tavis: The obvious stuff - we knew that people were much more casual and free and open about smoking back in the sixties, that we did know; hence the scene we just saw a moment ago. I said to myself, “I hope Jon Hamm doesn't get sick, smoking all those cigarettes.” Because you guys are smoking, like, in every scene.

Hamm: Yeah, it's pretty rough. Fortunately, they're not real cigarettes. They don't have nicotine or tar or any of that stuff.

Tavis: That helps, yeah.

Hamm: That helps a lot. But by the end of the day on a full day, my contacts are sticking to my eyes and I'm just - you're kind of walking around in a haze, literally.

Tavis: When I saw the first episode, and this is in advance of knowing that you were going to come on the show and I was just curious to see what this thing was about because the ads were everywhere. So I checked it out and I was, like, blown away when there was - in the scene where the new secretary goes in for a checkup - actually going to get some pills, get on the pill, from her doctor. And while she's in the doctor's room, he lights up.

Hamm: Smoking a cigarette.

Tavis: I couldn't believe - I was, like, wow. So one, he's a doctor smoking, but then he's lighting up during an examination.

Hamm: Well, and the scene we saw was trying to come up with a new way to pitch cigarettes because what had just happened was Reader's Digest had published this very famous study that basically said cigarettes were addictive and they cause cancer, in no uncertain terms. So the federal government then said, “All right, you can't pitch these things as healthy anymore; they're clearly not.”

And before that it was, like, four out of five doctors smoke Lucky Strike, and if you smoke these it'll make your throat clear and it'll give you energy and it'll be all this stuff that is patently untrue. (Laughter) So then the challenge of my character was, in the first episode, to come up with a new way to pitch these. And what he basically comes up with is it's toasted, which is a meaningless slogan, but it gets people off of it's cancerous, it's terrible, it's gonna kill you. Who cares? It tastes good.

Tavis: That's what advertising does - change the conversation.

Hamm: Kind of, yeah. And if you look at advertising as sort of a way - the way I kind of describe it is that these guys get to determine what makes people happy, whether it's buying a certain car, smoking a certain cigarette, wearing a certain suit or shirt. It defines cool and it defines, by a measure of that, what makes you happy. And yet all of these guys are unfulfilled, in relationships that maybe they're not so happy with, in jobs that maybe they're not so happy with, trying to manage it with cigarettes and booze and all the other stuff that you sort of self-medicate with.

Tavis: Your last point notwithstanding, Jon, what have you taken - or what are you taking, what are you learning, as this show goes forward? What are you learning about how you feel about what advertisers, advertising really does to us? Subliminally, a lot of times.

Hamm: I think nowadays people are much more savvy to what they're being fed, especially young kids. You get online and you're constantly bombarded with images and information and a lot of it's maybe untrue, and a lot of it's maybe spam email or whatever it is. So I think kids now, their detectors are much more fine-tuned than the people in my generation or even older, because we're just, I think, sort of accustomed - if it's in print, you kind of believe it.

Well, it must be true. And I think more recent history has made us believe that well, let's take everything with a little bit of a grain of salt, including especially advertising. So I think that's something that I've always - I've always been a fan of advertising, I've always been a fan of television, I've loved commercials, I've loved all the jingles, I loved all the stuff. And we - the sixties and seventies - the seventies when I was a little kid was like a golden age of that.

You had the Coke commercials and you had all the cool car ads and all that stuff was fun. It was really fun to watch and fun to be a part of. And only later in your life do you realize that there's a reason it's fun; it's because they want to get you on board and they want you to buy their product.

Tavis: The other thing I was just literally - we were just teasing - I was in the makeup room with my makeup artist, Sheila and Vanessa, the producer of this segment, and we were talking about the show and about the blatant sexism. (Laughs) I would be fired and sued 10 million times over -

Hamm: Oh, six ways to Sunday, man.

Tavis: - if I did half the stuff you do in this TV show.

Hamm: And I'm not even the bad one.

Tavis: And you're not the worst one in the series.

Hamm: No, I'm not. I'm not the bad one.

Tavis: I was about to say that. (Laughs) The guys down the hallway are much worse than you are.

Hamm: But it's not just sexism. It's sexism, it's racism, it's homophobia - it's all of this stuff which is sort of anybody that's remotely different. And a big theme of the show is at this point in time - and it kind of sits at a watershed moment in American history in 1960 - and people think the sixties, they tend to think of the late sixties which is like the hippies and the counterculture and the drug culture and all that other stuff.

But this was the very end of the Eisenhower era and the very beginning of the sixties and what would become the Kennedy era. And it sits right on this thing of - and my character sits right on this precipice as well between the younger generation and the older generation. And our creator, Matt Weiner, talks about half the people in America didn't vote for Kennedy.

Half the people - half the people - were very upset that Kennedy got elected and wanted to stay back in the fifties and that kind of old way of thinking. And politically, that's when a lot of the southern Democrats split off and all this other stuff happened. There was a lot going on at the beginning of the sixties and it was all kind of underground and Kennedys and the civil rights movement and LBJ and Vietnam all kind of brought it to the surface.

Tavis: I didn't know - to the series itself - I didn't know, Jon, what to expect, of course, when I tuned in for the first episode. What I did find personally was that for me it was refreshing to see somebody attempt something different - to do something different on the television landscape right about now. I'm so over reality television, so over every show being like every other show.

And I didn't know if I was going to like "Madmen" or not, but I was at least turned on by the fact that here was something that was a throwback to a bygone era. The costumes were - the set and everything else is authentic. So it was refreshing for me to see something different on the screen. As an actor, though, what's it feel like for you to be able to be a part of that (unintelligible)?

Hamm: It feels great. You hit the nail on the head. It's just nice to be involved with something that is original in every sense of the word. It's not like "CSI," it's not like "Big Brother" or any reality. It is a very scripted, very tightly controlled. We shoot it like a movie. There's one camera, and we set up scenes and we try to decorate them, and everybody's looking sharp and it's lit well and it's very high quality television.

But all of our creative people, for the most part, come from "The Sopranos," which was the same way. They shot that thing like a movie, they wrote it like a movie, they took their time telling their story. There were these kind of tangential things that maybe led to something or maybe didn't, but they still were worthy of being included in the story. And at the end of the day, that's what we're doing - we're telling a story. We're telling a story about my character and the world he lives in. And hopefully more people will find it's a very fascinating world.

I happen to find it incredibly fascinating just because of all the questions that it brings up. Were people really like this? Was sexism and racism and all that stuff - was it that in your face?

Tavis: What's funny about it is - I'm out of time here, but what's funny about it is when you think about it, it wasn't that long ago.

Hamm: And it wasn't that long ago.

Tavis: That's the scary part. (Laughs)

Hamm: That's the scary part.

Tavis: It's, like, 40 years ago.

Hamm: That's so true.

Tavis: It wasn't that long ago. Nice to meet you.

Hamm: Lovely to meet you, as well. I'm going to give you that one, yeah.

Tavis: No, I got you (unintelligible). Thank you. (Laughter) Jon Hamm, one of the stars of "Madmen" on AMC. I think it's worth checking out. You check it out and let me know.