Mad Men's writer Matthew Weiner says the Mannerist style of the 1950s, which returned in the 1980s, still lives on today. Photo / Supplied by Prime

Mad Men's writer Matthew Weiner says the Mannerist style of the 1950s, which returned in the 1980s, still lives on today. Photo / Supplied by Prime

As Mad Men moves further into the 1960s in its third season, the acclaimed series depicting the fraught lives of the creatives at a Madison Avenue advertising agency remains something unique.

It might be stuck in a nicotine-stained martini-soaked past. But as its growing haul of Emmys and Golden Globes show, it's the greatest American television drama on screen right now.

Other than its setting, the show's initial calling card was its ties to the previous greatest US television drama title-holder - The Sopranos - via its creator Matthew Weiner.

He was a writer on the series, his early Mad Men spec scripts having won him the mob job after years as a journeyman sitcom scribe.

Weiner was in New Zealand last week to be the keynote speaker at the annual conference for the Screen Production and Development Association of New Zealand (SPADA).

And speak he certainly can, his rapid-fire, digressive answers during a half-hour interview with TimeOut suggesting one happy, obsessed, perfectionist madman is behind Mad Men, a show he says isn't really about the 1960s or advertising, but how people's private realities differ to the face they show others.

"I think the show is about how hard it is to be a person and the constant regulation between your personal life, your private personal internal desires and the reality you can achieve in the world."

Weiner's world might have reached 1963, some time before the decade's cultural and political upheavals, but its period isn't the only reason the show stands out.

It's also in the way it looks and sounds, how the characters speak to each other, how the storylines subvert audience expectations, how its leading man Don Draper isn't actually Don Draper ... and more. How did this come to be this way?

Here's Weiner on Mad Men's points of difference:

It's set in the 1960s. But "the 1960s" hasn't really started yet. And they were a rerun anyway.

"I was born in 1965 and the lifestyle of the people in the show didn't disappear until 1980 for a lot of America. At the end of season two, the Cuban Missile Crisis was definitely a cultural landmark for people's attitude about the government, about each other, about personal responsibility. Part of the message of the show is that history is always in tumult. A lot of things we associate with the 60s - free love, drugs anti-establishment, anti-corporate, environmentalism - these things had already started and in fact had been cyclically represented in American culture and dismissed over and over again. And I don't think there is very much about the hippy culture that isn't related to the beatnik culture if you wanted to find the 60s that way.