The Red Road, at first glance, seems written from the playbook of small-town mystery, but fights hard to bring a rarely felt tone and texture to a genre which has a well-established style.

It begins with a familiar story device. A small boy is badly injured in a hit-and-run accident, but who did it? In this case, the boys ethnicity – he is Native American, from the nearby Lanape tribe – sets in motion a cultural conflict that threatens to engulf the small town of Walpole, New Jersey.

Not helping matters is the fact that one of the suspects is the local policeman's wife, who is battling the demons of both mental illness and alcohol addiction. The clashing cultures and the dark tone combine to make this, at its heart, the story of a bargain made in the shadows and its consequences.

The series also examines the formation of an unlikely friendship, if you could call it that, at least in the first episodes, between the town's good-natured cop, Harold Jensen (Martin Henderson), who is dealing with a raft of issues at home, and a local Native American man, Phillip Kopus (Jason Momoa).

The show's creator and writer, Aaron Guzikowski, wanted to bring to the screen a different kind of America than that commonly seen in scripted dramas. Walpole, for all its small-town quirk, is not Twin Peaks. Nor is it Northern Exposure's Cicely.

"If you can tell a compelling enough story and the characters are interesting enough, then people will follow you wherever you want to take them, shining a light on things that you don't usually see represented as much," Guzikowski said.

The series was originally titled The Descendants, but the producers and the show's United States broadcaster, the Sundance Channel, decided to change it to avoid confusion with the George Clooney film of the same name.

The new title, The Red Road, revels in its double meaning, co-executive producer Bridget Carpenter says. "It's about walking the right path, but it's also a bloody road. It's a dark, toxic road."

"You think of historically in America, the trail of tears, which is a trail where American Indians were forced ever westwards and died along the way of disease and the cold. I hope that we don't just talk about two Americas but many."

New Zealand-born Henderson describes Jensen as a fundamentally tragic character. "He started his life as a hero, a golden boy, the quarterback. He was going to get a football scholarship and had a cheerleader girlfriend.

"But what you come to realise about Harold is that he never reached his potential or realised his dreams. He's broken. He's a cop and he cares about his community, but he's kind of on autopilot. He makes this deal . . . and goes down a dark road."

For Momoa, the challenge was honouring Kopus' ancestry, while still playing him as a man caught between two cultures. Momoa is himself a mix of Native Hawaiian, German, Irish and Native American.

"I'm the stray dog. I'm the outcast and no one likes me," he says of Kopus, who is searching for a native identity, but seems unable to escape his drug-dealing father, Jack (Tom Sizemore).

"I'm bad news and they don't want me," Momoa says. "Every race or tribe or community has a bad seed. I'm representing them, but I'm not. I'm still coming back to my roots."

As Kopus reconnects with his people, he grapples with glimpses of his life as it might have been. "He slowly finds out that he has a brother. He's never had a brother and he doesn't want him along," Momoa says.

"He's a sad little boy, but you find out what happened and you see that he was wronged. His life would have been different and he would have been just like Harold and found love if things hadn't gone this way."

Henderson says the series plays loudly into the uncertain space between classic heroes and villains. "We've all got a bit of light and dark in us, and what's beautiful about a viewer is you can sit back and almost revel in someone else's darkness.

"In a perverse way, we like it when they get away with it, because we know we have that in us, but society forces us most of the time to toe the right line. We always like a good baddie."

Although The Red Road has a different tone and texture from the classic small-town mystery, Walpole creates a television trope as old as Peyton Place: as each layer of the town's relationships is peeled back, more secrets are revealed.

"Ironically, Harold has put himself in a position where he has to question his morals because he finds out a lot of stuff that's going on within his community and the Native American community," Henderson says.

"Because of the bad deeds he's done, although for good reasons, his conscience forces him to step up and make some sacrifices that he really hasn't before."

Sundance commissioned six one-hour episodes of The Red Road. A second season has been filmed and will be launched in the US in April.

"We have ideas, lots of them," Guzikowski says.

"We just want to go for it," Carpenter says. "We're ready. We had so much in this first season that we had to cut out."

The Red Road, Showcase, Sunday, 7.30pm.