It's been interesting to watch the BBC trying to play down its own suggestion that The Hour, a drama set around a Beeb newsroom in 1956, is a kind of Mad Men UK.

In articles boosting the series in the corporation’s Radio Times magazine, the point is made repeatedly. During an interview with star Dominic West, we’re told, “The Hour has been dubbed the BBC’s answer to Mad Men. West thinks the comparison is ridiculous …” Elsewhere: “Too many people have described this as Britain’s answer to Mad Men. That’s just lazy…”

All well and good – except it’s the BBC’s own heavily rotated trailers that have done the most to propose that a British Mad Men is precisely what’s on offer, right down to utilising a Saul Bass-inspired font found nowhere in the programme itself.

The backtracking is understandable. Having been sold a bill of Don Draper that isn’t there, viewers might not stick around to appreciate what is. To be clear: leave aside that it’s a well-realised period drama set against a creative industry, and that suits, cigarettes, sexism and strong drinks feature, The Hour isn’t like Mad Men at all. It’s not as good, for one thing, but not much is. Where Mad Men, beneath the 1960s trappings, is really about people and inner lives, unafraid to be spacey and inchoate, The Hour is all about plot, with characters there mostly to point out themes and what’s going on.

Writer Abi Morgan baldly offers two elements. First, a behind-the-cameras drama, strongly reminiscent of the excellent Road To Coronation Street. Following the stumbling efforts to create a new TV journalism and move away from the dry, forelock-tugging near-propaganda of the newsreels, the focus is again on a watershed moment in British TV, driven by bolshy firebrands keen to tell it “like it is”.

As the most driven of the journalists, Ben Whishaw aims after the kind of lean-working-class-hero-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder last seen from the young Tom Courtenay. He’s matched by Romola Garai, underplaying as the new current affairs programme’s producer, a woman with a lot to prove. West, as the handsome, out-of-his-depth presenter parachuted in to front the show (and complete a romantic triangle), seems underwritten, at least to begin with.

On top, Morgan grafts a thriller – murder, conspiracy – to keep you watching all the broadcast history. It’s a good idea, but doesn’t quite gel. Some of The Hour’s themes are very timely: we see journalists paying cops for information and railing against government control. But the show has a tendency to get in its own way.

In the episodes I’ve seen, the live TV studio excitement never really kicks in; there’s a moment in part two, as the Suez Canal crisis begins to break, that gets going then just … tails away. Meanwhile, the thriller can feel eye-droppered into the cracks. All the same, the show has its own character, and the intrigue does begin to get its hooks in. There’s enough going on to keep watching, and keep hoping it might yet make a cocktail that’s more than the sum of its parts.

Also a playwright, Abi Morgan made her name as a force on TV with Channel 4’s award-winning Sex Traffic in 2004, with John Simm as the researcher unravelling a corporate conspiracy involving the forced sale of Eastern European women into prostitution. Morgan is best known for tackling contemporary subjects in screenplays such as the BBC’s White Girl, Tsunami: The Aftermath, and her movie adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. But she has done a British period piece before, looking all the way back to 1981 for last year’s Royal Wedding, which contrasted life in a Welsh town against Charles and Di’s big day.