Click here to watch the trailer for Dirty Sexy Money

Television was created with the family in mind. Being British, we started with a high-minded mission to educate and inform, but soon gave that up and got in the sitcoms. In America, however, Congress was insisting television should be about and for the family as early as the 1950s.

In the 1970s, the small screen saw the family through misty eyes - in Family, Eight Is Enough, The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie – while the 1980s of Dallas and Dynasty revelled in it as a focus for high fashion and high finance. By the 1990s, however, family was on reality television in Oprah and Jerry Springer, washing its laundry with bile and venom. This led scripted series to create “new family” units, such as the guys you hung out with in Friends and Seinfeld. Now, with the new series Dirty Sexy Money, the family is back, taking the fiction of New York’s wealthiest clan and gorging on its dysfunction. The Bible Belt must view its arrival as an omen of the end of days.

We see the Darlings through the eyes of purity. Idealistic Nick George (Six Feet Under’s Peter Krause) reluctantly becomes the family lawyer for the ultra-wealthy, eccentric New York Darlings when his father, their previous attorney, dies suspiciously. The machiavellian patriarch, Donald Sutherland, buys George’s soul by donating to his fiancée’s charity - although he had hoped to hire Bill Clinton. Within seconds, Nick is bailing out the wastrel Jeremy Darling when he wins a yacht that’s packed with illegal immigrants in a poker game, covering for the aspiring politician Patrick Darling’s trans-sexual affairs, smoke-screening three murder investigations and fending off hatred from the Rev Brian Darling and sexual advances from the sultry Karen Darling. He’s busy, busy, busy.

Of course, it’s not hard to see where the executive producer, Greg Berlanti, gets his material. The matriarch, Letitia Darling, is in the Jackie Kennedy mould - where “mould” means “exact template”. Samaire Armstrong’s Juliet Darling, meanwhile, is a peroxide-blonde heiress trying to make it as an actress while slutting her way through New York society. Paris Hilton has never seemed so interesting - but Armstrong’s script is better. Indeed, the show seems to be pouring scorn on the likes of Hilton and her gadabout gang just as their own families are rebelling at the monstrosity of their excess.

American television has been creeping in this direction for some time, of course, with the corus-cating influence of blood ties firmly at the heart of Six Feet Under and last year’s Brothers & Sisters. Joining Dirty Sexy Money on our screens is Jimmy Smits, in Cane - a business epic about scheming Cuban-American rum magnates - giving us more feuding clans to watch than the UN observers at Culloden.

There’s no question where this particular trend began: in New Jersey in 1999. David Chase had been touting his Sopranos script around Hollywood for three years before HBO spotted its potential. The idea of family shows - even shows about “the family” – was dead, he was told. Yet, in this postSopranos world, amorality at the heart of all relationships delights US primetime audiences, from Desperate Housewives to the forthcoming Pushing Daisies (in which the romantic lead is basically a serial rekiller). Even a series called Heroes features messed-up failures barely managing to get by. Which is why the time is so perfect for Sutherland.

As Dirty Sexy Money’s camp insanity unfolds, he lurks at the centre, channelling Mephistopheles as beautifully as ever. When the plots wobble too far from their tracks, when the bodies smother credulity, he can freeze screen time with just the slightest, barely audible breath.

When we meet on the set, he is in wisecracking form. What keeps a 72-year-old working so hard? “Debt,” he deadpans. And how do you think Dirty Sexy Money compares with 1980s family sagas such as Dynasty and Dallas? “I didn’t see Dallas and Dynasty - I was really somewhere else in the 1980s.” I laugh. He looks mock-outraged. “Now you’re guessing,” he says.

His character, he believes, is not a devious man. “He’s someone who pursues the poetry of truth,” he smiles slightly. “I mean, I know a lot about manipulation, but he doesn’t.” And does he believe the show’s premise - that wealth and power are dirty and sexy? “It’s true there are certain aspects of power that are associated with money,” he nods. “If you look at Bill Clinton, you know power corrupts, and absolute power makes you really horny. But look at Warren Buffett. Look at Bill Gates. They certainly feel their power, but they feel an obligation to participate economically and socially in the community they live in.”

He pauses and grins. “The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky talked to a graduating class at Dartmouth in 1989. He looked at them and he said, ‘You know, this is the best day of the rest of your life. Everything else is going to go downhill from now on. You’re going to get things. The more things you get, the more boring it’s going to be. In the middle of it all, try to stay passionate. Leave your cool to the constellation. Passion alone is a remedy against boredom.’”

Dirty Sexy Money is on Channel 4 from March 21 at 9pm

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