The Red Road (Thursdays, 9/8C) is the second original scripted drama from Sundance TV (formerly Sundance Channel) and it is as ambitiously broad in scope as Rectify is in its intimacy. The series boils the travails of a well-to-do small town and a federally unrecognized tribe of Native Americans down to the efforts of the town’s sheriff and an ex-con member of the Lenape tribe. While not as immediately brilliant as Rectify, The Red Road has the seeds of greatness in it.
Harold Jensen (Martin Henderson) is the sheriff of Walpole, New Jersey. His wife, Jean (Julianne Nicholson), and he sleep in separate rooms because she has troubling sleeping since she’s trying to quit drinking. Eldest daughter Rachel (Allie Gonino) is seeing Junior Van Der Veen (Kiowa Gordon), a Lenape boy – which drives Jean a bit nuts (for good reason, it turns out). Younger daughter Kate (Annalise Basso) is not yet at that rebellious stage.
Junior is a decent sort, though easily influenced by the wrong sort of crowd – which includes Mike Parker (Zahn McCarron), who is responsible for the disappearance of a rich kid. In turn, that brings tensions to a keen edge between the townsfolk and the Lenape. Then there’s Junior’s brother, Phillip (Jason Momma), a towering ex-con who seems about to become part of a tenuous alliance to keep things civil between the Lenape and the people of Walpole.
Written by Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners), The Red Road is a bit of Romeo and Juliet, a bit of a buddy movie and a bit of a study of interracial relations. The premiere, Arise My Love, Shake off This Dream, sets the tone early, with Phillip walking into to focus approaching a powwow and seeing Harold asking people in the crowd if they’ve seen the missing student before heading back the way he came.
From there, we see Harold visiting a house where the woman who answers makes a comment about how it took two weeks to get someone to look for a missing Lenape kid, but this rich kid gets immediate attention.
In relatively short order, we meet most of the regular cast through the events of their day, but even the most normal things take on a sinister aspect because of the way Guzikowski and director James Gray (We Own The Night) set up an eerie, off-kilter tone early on that lurks beneath the most regular moments – like the easy rapport between Junior and Rachel as they smoke up in a ruined barn – and shifts into high gear in scenes like the one where a manic Jean drives to the Van Der Vein home, carrying Harold’s service pistol.
Perhaps it’s because the cast is so good, and Gray does such an excellent job of maintaining pace and tone, but it took most of the premiere before I realized that I wasn’t nearly as involved as I’d been with SundanceTV’s first original series, Rectify. The more I thought about it, the more I came to understand that there are so many things going on that no one of them really stands on its own – and some of the connections between them are more than tenuous.
More could probably have been done, for instance, with connecting a tragedy that happened twenty years ago to the way recent events have everyone (and especially Jean) on razor’s edge. And, while good use is made of Gordon and Gonino’s chemistry, none of the other characters match the sparks set by Junior and Rachel – Phillip and Harold barely even meet in the premiere.
On the plus side, there will be ample opportunity for the series to develop each strand of the overall story and its relationships into something special. For now, though, The Red Road is well worth watching for the performances, tone and some very intriguing possibilities.
Final Grade: B
Photo of Junior and Rachel by James Minchin/Photos courtesy of SundanceTV.