Pushing up daisies

Death need not ruin your life. As the actor Peter Krause shows in 'Six Feet Under', it can be a shot in the arm, writes Janine Gibson

'There's a Zen Buddhist phrase," says Peter Krause. "One world at a time. I take that to mean, live your life well while you have it. We are constantly reminded that the grim reaper will come and find you; Six Feet Under is about life and finding that personal attitude towards it which enables you live your life one world at a time."

He pauses. "Does consciousness continue? This human life isn't a one-shot deal. I think it's beautiful - the one-ness of human experience is beautiful, and Six Feet Under is all about that."

Sometimes, not very often, a TV show comes along that has everything going for it. Great word of mouth, handsome and funny stars, a writer straight out of an enormous Oscar-winning movie, a brilliant concept. Six Feet Under was one of those shows.

From the writer of American Beauty, garlanded with rave reviews, made by HBO, the home of the best US television, it arrived on Channel 4 last year. It had been scheduled late and was expected to do a West Wing or an NYPD Blue - find a small but faithful audience, which would then spend years being frustrated by the inconvenience of loving the show.

But then, the unexpected happened. Six Feet Under became the surprise early summer hit for Channel 4, pulling in three million viewers. It returned last night for season two with a big build-up courtesy of a brilliantly dark marketing campaign based on the cosmetics advertisements featured in the first series. Shot like your average make-up commercials, this campaign's twist is that the foundation in question is for the recently deceased. The marketing, like the show itself, suggests that death is a cruel joke, but not something that should substantially ruin your life.

People die in Six Feet Under much as they do in ER, CSI or even Casualty - randomly, cruelly, peacefully and sometimes comically. In Six Feet Under, though, how they die is little more than a curiosity. It's who they were and who they now are that matters. Their spirits infuse the episodes. In series one, the character of Nathaniel Fisher, owner of the Fisher and Sons funeral home, is at the heart of the show, even though he dies in its opening minutes. To us, Nathaniel appears through his eldest son, Nate, whom we first meet returning for the holidays from his bacchanalian life in San Francisco.

Nate, played by Krause, arrives at the airport expecting to meet his father. Instead, he shags a stranger in a cupboard. As his father dies, mown down by a bus, Nate is the epitome of irresponsibility. The theme of the first series is his gradual realisation that he has to take on a role running the family business, learning to be an undertaker and being a brother to his siblings, a son to his mother, and a partner to this stranger. (She turns out to be Rachel Griffiths and therefore not, as we had assumed, a one-shag-stand.)

From the outset, we see the irresistible qualities of Nate. He's a bit wild, but he's thrust into a position of unaccustomed responsibility as a family man and leader. He only really needs a small child to be the next George Clooney as far as the viewing ladies are concerned (and the second series might well remedy that lack).

There are some actors that it would be fine to interview over the phone. Peter Krause is not one of them. It is perhaps no coincidence that, despite the quality of his onscreen and theatre roles, his Internet fansites are dedicated to pictures of him and very little in the way of words.

This is incredibly unfair (as well as, yes, terribly sexist). Not least because Krause is actually distinguished by the very smart way he has built his career around shows created by the finest writers working in television. Bless him, though, because he doesn't particularly mind, and in fact he knows perfectly well that he has to pout a bit, even if he's a little shamefaced. "You've got to sell yourself. You've got to market 'the sexy actor'. That's the game that's played."

He was working on a cult ABC show, Sports Night, set in a TV sports newsroom, when talk of HBO's new series written by Alan Ball, fresh from American Beauty, started to leak out. Sports Night - created by one of the other great US TV writers of recent times, Aaron Sorkin - was about to be cancelled, and Sorkin was off to create The West Wing. Krause was about to be out of a job. But he had worked with Ball on Cybill, Shepherd's eponymous sitcom, and went to read for the part of David, Nate's younger brother.

Ball was confused, Krause remembers. "He said, 'I thought you were going to come in and read Nate.' So I went back and read for Nate, started to focus on Nate and realised he was not unlike myself and would be more challenging. I don't know if it's just because I play him, but I would argue he's the most complex character on the show. Nate has a hero complex, always trying to be a nice guy, which is pretty common - people always want to be seen as the nice guy - but the beginning of the third series takes him into a different place. The third series is like you keep charging up this hill and you keep going and going.

"I think David certainly seems like the more dramatic role initially, but Alan and I talked and he had definite plans for Nate." What's clever about this rather sweetly modest story (modest because Nate is undoubtedly the star of the show, albeit an ensemble show) is thatKrause had identified Ball back in the Cybill days as someone who was "dissatisfied with the state of US television and wanted to do things that you couldn't do on network TV in the US", and clearly worked that connection.

Or, as he puts it, "I learned after some time in Hollywood that if I targeted the writer then I'd be a lot happier. Find the good scripts, and then fight very hard for those things that are conceived well. "

For Krause then, the brilliance of Six Feet Under is all in the writing, and he's not wrong. It uses two simple devices very successfully: the first is the old death-of-the-week trick used everywhere, which gives an episode a momentum and also a theme to explore; a baby might die (and indeed did) in an episode where several characters are exploring attitudes to children. The second is the talking-to-dead-people trick. In Six Feet Under, as Krause terms it, "consciousness" is fluid. Death is not the end, and the dead pop up liberally, sharing advice or providing a useful sounding board for a character in trouble. It's a way of seeing inside the protagonists' heads; their conversations with dead people are essentially soliloquies which no other living person hears.

"It's a much more accessible show than it seems. It's about a family and they happen to run a funeral home. The interesting thing is including the element of how each character relates to themselves - we get to follow their thoughts and how they're relating to themselves if they're disappointed in themselves." It's also very funny.

- Guardian service

The second series of Six Feet Under continues on Channel 4 on Sunday