If television is to be believed, the world of advertising is one where the most talented executives can take three-hour-three-martini lunches, spend weekday afternoons dallying in bed with their lover du jour, and disappear for days at a time as long as the ideas keep on coming.

TNT’s latest drama, “Trust Me,” does nothing to discourage that notion.

“Ed”‘s fast-talking Tom Cavanagh plays Conner, the guy who’s always got a new tagline on the tip of his tongue and a new girl on the hook. “Will & Grace”‘s Eric McCormack plays Mason, Conner’s “partner” – the yin to his yang, the superego to his id, the responsible, uptight married man to his impulsive single guy.

“I’ve seen this guy in various forms in pretty much every job I’ve done,” says Cavanagh.

McCormack is more specific: “It’s Cavanagh, for one thing,” he laughs. “That guy is a nut bag. He has the energy of an 18-year-old, which is annoying because we’re the same age. Sean Hayes was the same way. They both have that kind of nutty energy you want to reign in just a little bit but not too much.”

The two Canadians play off each other like that both behind and in front of the camera: “It’s like that line from ‘Rocky,'” says Cavanagh, “She’s got gaps, I got gaps. Together, we fill gaps.”

“Trust Me” is written and produced by two former Chicago ad executives, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny, who met working at Leo Burnett. After Baldwin quit and Coveny was laid off, the two decided to move their families to Hollywood and become television producers. This oft-tried plan rarely works, but things snapped into place for them.

They began like all upstart screenwriters: writing scripts on spec – aka for free. Soon enough, they were hired to write for Fox’s short-lived “Fastlane,” helped by Coveny’s relationship with producer/director McG, with whom Coveny had worked on commercials. Later, they were hired to write for TNT’s “The Closer.” “Trust Me” is the first show the pair will oversee themselves.

“We had ‘Trust Me’ as a half-hour comedy bopping around when [producer] Greer [Shepherd] walked into our office and said TNT was looking for a show set in the advertising arena and did we have anything,” says Coveny. “So we put on our drama hats and turned the script into a drama with Greer.”

Due to its setting, “Trust Me” will inevitably draw comparisons to AMC’s critically heralded “Mad Men.” While being set in an ad agency is the only similarity between the two shows, Baldwin and Coveny aren’t sweating the comparison.

“We are big fans of ‘Mad Men,'” says Coveny. “We have a crazy personal connection to that show and [star] Jon Hamm is one of our good friends. And the stories that show tells don’t even compare to the stories we heard from our bosses about advertising in the 60s.”

While Hamm was already spoken for, Baldwin and Coveny consider it “incredibly good fortune” that McCormack and Cavanaugh wanted to do their series. “When we first wrote the script, we didn’t really have actors in mind,” says Baldwin. “We had prototypes of people we knew we had in Chicago in mind. But one of the themes of the show is rebranding and whether it’s possible for people to rebrand themselves. Both Tom and Eric were interested rebranding themselves. They were enthusiastic about doing something different than what each of them are so well-known for.”

Baldwin and Coveny say the two actors are not playing them, but early on did look to them – their clothes, their eyeglasses, their mannerisms – for inspiration.

But that’s all good, says Coveny. “No matter which of these actors people think is playing me, I’m skinny and good-looking. So I win either way.”

TRUST ME

Monday, 10 p.m., TNT