That "universality" may be the reason Resurrection pulled an audience of more than 13 million when it launched in the US two weeks ago and why Seven has high hopes for its Australian launch on Tuesday night. "We all experience loss in our lives and we all have to figure a way to navigate through it," says Zelman.

The show is about a small town where people who died 30 years ago come back to life, provoking complex emotional reactions in their loved ones. It's based on a novel called The Returned, by Jason Mott, which also inspired a French series shown recently on SBS.

Zelman decided to turn the novel into a TV series because he'd gone through a painful divorce just before reading it. "I didn't need to have someone close to me die to identify with these characters," he said. "I had experienced grief for the relationship. There was a tremendous sense of loss for me in terms of the life that I had. Suddenly your in-laws are people you're not going to see much any more, if at all. I wanted to represent in the show all those different ways that people respond to loss."

Zelman's writing had mostly been for crime series such as Law and Order, Criminal Minds, Damages and the US version of The Killing. "I was thrilled to dive into something that flexed more muscles for me - part mystery, part thriller, part drama and part emotional journey."

What's surprising is that Resurrection was funded by the mainstream US network ABC. It sounds more suited to a cable channel such as HBO, which is more interested in critical approval than big ratings.

Zelman says he's lucky to be working in "the golden age of television", when a story can be told in the voice of an individual author because the mainstream networks are keen to be credited with the next Breaking Bad, or Mad Men, or Sopranos, or True Detective.

"There is a sense of authorship now that wasn't there before," Zelman says. "The old model was that a guy created a show with a team of writers, and he might stay for a couple of years before handing the reins to someone else. That's a kind of group-think way of doing it. Now they look for one person's vision. It's impossible to think of Breaking Bad without Vince Gilligan, or Mad Men without Matthew Weiner.

"That's not to say that other writers and the directors and the producers aren't contributing immense amounts of work to this process. But there's a difference between a traditional product of the network machine and a show that has a consistency of voice."

I confessed to Zelman that I was reluctant to commit to his series because I feared it would be a case of "Lost Syndrome" - grabbing audiences with an intriguing idea, then disappointing them by dragging on for years with no satisfying conclusion. He tried to reassure me.

"That is a concern that we shared through the writing process," he said. "You have to constantly be providing answers while at the same time raising new questions to keep people interested. You always need to have a plan about what season two and beyond will look like.

"I hope fans will always feel a sense that some chapter has been completed while a new one is set to begin.

''I can tell you right now there is a cliffhanger at the end of the first season, I don't want to be coy about that. But there is a satisfying conclusion also to many aspects that you've been tracking over the eight episodes."

Oh, all right then, I said cautiously, I might stick with it for a couple more weeks.

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