Sam Malone, the bouffant-crested loser barman whom Ted Danson played for 11 years on Cheers, never boasted a halo but he did, it turned out, wear a toupée. In the sitcom’s final moments it slipped, revealing two slivers of bald on the back of his head. The big guy had been scalped. Talking to Danson in a London hotel about Damages, the American series showing on BBC One, I wonder how much of Sam’s hitherto crowning glory – and hence his dignity – would be left 15 years on.

“He may have a bald spot, like me. I’ve no idea,” Danson replies, slightly irritated, I suspect, by the speculation that his follicles still attract. We agree, however, that Sam would probably still be tending at the Boston bar that substituted as a home not just for him but also Frasier Crane (as nailed by Kelsey Grammer), the only one of the barflies who got away – in his case by spinning into his own series.

“A while back we called the writers and said, ‘Come on. Let’s go play again’. My thought was with Frasier ending you could have Frasier get on a plane leaving Seattle, fly back to Boston, walk into the bar and have all of us ten years older still there. He goes, ‘Hey, what’s been happening?’ And we take off into a new series.” And they said no? “The Charles brothers and Jimmy Burrows probably wisely said, ‘Let’s leave it alone. It worked its course for 11 years and it would be a shame to potentially mess it up’. ”

Danson, who has just turned 60, must have sometimes wondered if he would ever again play a character as complex as Sam Malone – a stud who couldn’t keep a woman, a recovering alcoholic who owned a bar, an extrovert with no close friends. (One of Danson’s daughters pointed out to him the name was a pun on “I’m alone”). But he has a role worthy of him in Arthur Frobisher, the crooked business magnate in Damages, so much so that (since our meeting) he has been nominated for a Golden Globe. In the first episode, he was rather outshone by Glenn Close playing the lethal lawyer Patty Hewes, but he comes into his own in the second when in a moment of coke-headed hubris he orders a hit on a hostile witness and is visibly relieved when it does not go ahead.

“There’s a slightly pathetic side to him. He’s in way over his head. He arrogantly thinks that he can take on Patty Hewes because he lives in such an Arthur Frobisher world: ‘I’m a billionaire, I made this myself. I can buy you many times over. I am in the right. I have every right to protect myself. All right, so maybe I passed into the grey legal area. Who doesn’t in business at the highest level?’ But then he sees this powerful woman after him and he starts making worse and worse decisions and by the end of the piece he is completely deconstructed. It really is a brilliant part.”

To prepare, he employed the services of a New York acting coach. Harold Guskin told him to behave towards the script as Frobisher would the outside world: maybe I’ll say the line, maybe I won’t. He also met several corporate CEOs, whose common traits, he discovered, were their certainty and an inability to read others. “One guy actually realised this was a problem and hired somebody to be with him in meetings. He could never tell if people were just saying what they thought he wanted them to say.”

He acknowledges the comparisons with those other masters of the universe, television stars: “I mean, I know what it is to be narcissistic, to think it’s Ted’s world.” He realised his mistake aged 45 after he crashed his car. A voice told him he did not have to slow down as he took a kerb: “You’re Ted Danson and life’s good.” He very nearly wasn’t, and some attitudinal adjustments followed.

Damages, recently renewed for a second series by the American network FX, provides a professional fillip for Danson. After Cheers, his career in Hollywood, which had shown early promise in Three Men and a Baby, stalled. In dramatic roles, he did his best as a crusading lawyer in a 2002 mini series, The Gulf War, but was defeated by a schmaltzy script. As for the stage, Danson tells a terrifying story about drying up during a monologue written for him in New York. He had better luck with a sitcom, Becker, in which for six years he was the misanthropic MD of the title, but on either side of it lay the failed comedies Ink and last year’s Help Me Help You. He is funnier as an exaggeratedly self-righteous version of himself in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, but it is only a recurring cameo. Hence his enthusiasm for Damages. “Most of the work I’d been doing was comedy and I think part of me was feeling a little demoralised, like I had stayed too long at the dance. I was beginning to bore myself. There’s a rhythm or a music or a dance step that goes along with comedy and you disguise it, you make it look like it’s not there, but there is, there’s rhythm.” Damages was different. “There was suddenly no dance step going on behind me, no music playing and it was like I was going to do anything I wanted.”

He offers a technical explanation for the difficulties facing the half-hour American sitcom. Cheers, minus the ads, had a 26-minute running time. That figure has been whittled down to 22. “ Let Me Help You had a problem with trying to jam all of the wonderful stuff into 22 minutes. It didn’t have enough air in it.” Successful comedies now find ways of speeding up the narration: the voiceovers on My Name is Earl, the documentary format of The Office. “And the other thing I think is that Larry David changed the half hour with improvisation and the tone of Curb.”

Curb Your Enthusiasm taps into the truth that Cheers explored, that the funniest people and situations are often the saddest. Danson, who maintains the air of a naturally humorous man, says he knows this from experience. His second wife, Casey Coates, suffered a stroke giving birth to their daughter Katie. For six months he was the baby’s carer, a situation he now regards as a gift. A second, adopted daughter, Katrina, grew into a troubled teenager. “Because she talks about it, I can say with pride I think she’ll be all right. She is four years sober and is a glorious singer.” His marriage ended after a brief affair with Whoopi Goldberg, but in 1994 he met the actress Mary Steenburger while making the forgettable movie Pontiac Moon and proposed on her 42nd birthday. Her children by Malcolm McDowell, Lilly and Charlie, joined the household. “So we now have in our family two actresses, a striking writer, a director and a singer.”

So how does he feel about turning 60? More relaxed, he says, than about turning 50. “You’re starting to creep into being old, but proud of the fact that you’re still here, still upright and still working.” The truth, incidentally, is that Ted Danson, although white-haired, actually remains rather well thatched.

Damages, Sun, BBC One, 10.20pm

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