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Time was, the words "American family drama" were enough to see you hitting the remote before being assaulted with White-Picket Fenced visions of Apple-pie-munching, church-going, gingham-frocked huggy-huggy idealism. We met the Engels, we said goodnight to the Waltons, we came to actively loathe the family-unit for all its cloying sentiment and aspirational messages. And wondered why Americans ever bought into this shit.

Hot news. They don't. Well, not any more at least. It's been a slow process, but American TV has learned to air its dirty laundry in public, and - surprise surprise - the viewers have coped. Sex And The City has gleefully shown us the damp patch in the bed of sexual morality, The West Wing has wilfully taken a pee in the presidential punch-bowl and The Sopranos took us home with the other family, contract killings and all.

It's a trend to be welcomed, and the best is yet to come. Currently screening on Channel 4 and E4, Six Feet Under introduces us to the world of the Fisher family. And it's a fantastic world, too. One where people send bouquets to their ex's with the message 'Fuck you, cunt', where gay men cruise each other at funerals, where parents hide their recreational drug-use from their children, rather than the other way round and where death, arguably society's biggest hush-hush job, is confronted with every episode.

The Fishers, see, are a family of undertakers. Not the most immediate of premises, maybe, but when you consider that SFU is created, written and exec produced by Alan American Beauty Ball, you know that you're in for a pilgrimage to the altar of middle-class values, the aim being not to worship, but to point at all the cracks.

Accordingly, and a brief five minutes into the opening episode, we see Nathaniel Fisher, the patriarch, meeting his maker. At the time, he's driving a hearse through LA rush-hour traffic, using his mobile and (just in case there weren't enough fatal elements here) lighting up a cigarette. Then SPLAT, he's just another corpse, and we turn to the surviving family members to see how they're coping. Daughter Claire, for example, has just taken her first hit of Crystal Meth. Eldest son Nate is fucking, actually no, make that being fucked by a woman in a Janitor's cupboard at LA airport… Plainly, there is no John-Boy in this set-up.

And yes - there being no show without Punch - we have the by-now mandatory gay character, David Fisher, the conscientious 'Good son'. And no, there's nothing new about gay characters in US TV: we've chuckled at Will and Jack, we've seen the funny side of lesbian parenting in Friends, we've gotten to the point where we're like so over the whole gay thing and hey, is it really such a big deal these days?

Well yes, actually, for some people it is. We've become so accustomed to the progressive urban zeitgeist that informs current gay roles, that we've completely forgotten about the C-word. Yep, we're firmly back in the closet for this one, and it's a very skilfully observed scenario too. Upright and uptight, David is played with convincing caution by Michael C Hall in a spot-on reminder of the paranoid existence of the suburban homo, living just around the corner from the (whoops) former fiancée, and introducing your boyfriend as "my racket-ball partner".

As Hall explains, "Everything that I gleaned about the character was from the pilot script. I assumed that part of David's journey would be overcoming his self-loathing, coming out and not compartmentalising his behaviour. His state of conflict is, at its core, to do with his sexual orientation, but it's also about his relationships with his family, and the work he does. He's conservative and traditional, but he's also gay which is quite a contradiction."

David's "racket-ball partner" Keith (Matthew StPatrick), happens to be black. And a cop. And - oh look - rather gorgeous too. Unlike David, he's out, proud, and in no mood to do the lying thing. If anything, he's David's guide-dog in an unfamiliar world, and - reassuringly - it's not a world where one trip to a gay club and a casually-necked ecstasy makes perfect euphoric sense of it all. And when the writer of American Beauty asks you to play gay, it would take a particularly paranoid actor not to leap at the chance.

As StPatrick explains, "My only concern with any role is the integrity of the character - I didn't want to do anything stereotypical. I'm not interested in that. I come from a very stereotypical situation if you will, I'm an African-American living in the USA - right there you have stereotypes that I've lived with all my life, and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in broadening peoples' minds."

And this is no glib soundbyte disclaimer either. The relationship between David and Keith is certainly a volatile one, but it's also a wonderfully real one, where you find yourself rooting for the course of true love to find its way. They are - in the very best way - a lovely couple. And the feedback from the gay community in America (where season two of the show is currently airing) has been one of enormous approval.

"The response has been really supportive," confirms StPatrick, "and I'm really appreciative of that. Support from a lot of places, moreover - I had concerns about how the African-American community would react to this character because homosexuality is not something that's talked about a whole lot in that community. But I felt that it was a necessity for people to talk about it and be honest with themselves about it."

It becomes clear that StPatrick has a very astute grasp on sexual politics, in a humanitarian, rather than campaigning kind of way. "When you look at things like teenage suicide," he offers, by way of example, "it comes from people feeling they don't have a place to go to talk about what they're dealing with. Hopefully, and in however small a way, this show fills in some of those gaps. The relationship between David and Keith is coming from a very different place - it talks about love, about their personalities. You're going to love how it's handled throughout the series, I promise you."

He's not wrong. Over the 13 episodes of the first series, we follow David's uneasy steps through the whole coming-out thing, we share his first internet chatroom experience, his first porn purchase, the whole awkwardness of a life where you worry constantly if other people have, like, noticed. Naturally enough, it's a far bigger deal to him than to anyone else. His mother's reaction to meeting Keith, for example, is "You're friends with a cop?!", his brat-sister Claire (played superbly by Lauren Ambrose) just thinks it's like, cool.

With David and Keith we get only one strand of the many stories interweaved through this bizarrely likeable family. Each and every character has their own little closet, in effect, and the gentle prising open of the doors makes for genuinely addictive viewing. It's smart, it's incredibly funny (yes, even when dealing with death), but most of all, it shows up British Television (it's the finest in the world, you know) to be an idle beast, coasting by on unimaginative rural chunky-knit cardigan dramas featuring tired-out ex-sitcom actors. Death, plainly, is the way forward.

• Six Feet Under