The Red Road

The deliberate pacing and slow revelation of key motivations and certain relationships don't make it easy on viewers, but you didn't tune in for "Law & Order: Mahwah."

There’s such a richness of story and character here, and the visual and sound people do some great work cranking up the creep factor.

The Red Road demands patience, but from what I've seen, it strongly suggests that will be rewarded.

While The Red Road is not quite in the same league as "True Detective" or "Broadchurch," it is better than most, and it succeeds at drawing dramatic tension not from lots of plot-twist fireworks, but from the long-simmering resentments, private shames and historical injustices embedded in a community few viewers are familiar with.

This haunting six-episode season explores the deep divide between a parochial community and a marginalized Native American tribe.

It feels productively mysterious. The show tells you covertly a lot about the characters, building them up through bits of behavior and stray remarks that can seem contradictory at first but do start to cohere into something more complex.

A six-part saga awash in fashionable gloom, set in the mountains of New Jersey, and much of the time a compelling one in its picture of the tensions between the Van Der Veens, members of an Indian tribe, and the blue-collar Jensens, headed by Harold (Martin Henderson), a police officer.

There is a very strong sense of setting here and a few great performances; enough to warrant a look.

Red Road gets more gripping by the hour, although it still feels like a drop-off whenever Momoa isn’t on screen.

The Red Road, created by Aaron Guzikowski and produced by Sarah Condon, will likely be a little too downbeat and leisurely for some viewers. But based on the first few episodes, it may be a path worth traveling down.

The Red Road drops viewers into a complicated situation that only gets more complicated by the end of its first episode.

The Red Road may not be SundanceTV's strongest drama, but it has a hypnotic power, a strange rhythm of dread that makes it far more interesting than most network dramas.

Some of the plot falls into the No-Good-Can-Come-From-This category, especially Jensen’s cover-up efforts and his willingness to call a truce with Kopus. But mostly The Red Road, written by Aaron Guzikowski (“Contraband,” “Prisoners”), is a thrilling enough, character-driven crime drama that doesn’t shy away from cultural explorations, especially through Ms. Tunie’s Earth Mother character.

The exceptionally well-cast The Red Road starts well, but slips in the second episode.

You don't have to have lived through Watergate to know that it's the cover-up that gets you, but there's much more happening in The Red Road, maybe too much to be contained in a six-hour first season, and some of it more interesting than what's going on between these two men.

While certainly not bad, the series would be better if it came with fewer built-in speed bumps, and a little more narrative momentum.

Instead of thinking so much about complicated moral themes and Shakespearean redos, the show's creator and writers would have been better off trying to make the story credible and the characters three-dimensional and realistic.

The first three episodes are all hints and shadows and squandered time, while the show’s most intriguing context and premise--life in a forgotten and neglected tribe--gets lost in all the meandering.

At least the Sopranos knew how to have fun.... Mr. Momoa and Mr. Henderson acquit themselves well without generating any heat or much of any feeling. The best work is by Julianne Nicholson as Harold’s damaged wife and Zahn McClarnon as a foot soldier in Phillip’s drug operation.

It’s exciting to watch Momoa and Henderson give riveting performances, so it’s not like there’s nothing to recommend here. It’s just that in watching them do it, you wish the story was giving them more fodder and not bogging itself down in side arcs.

With the other Sundance series, very little may be happening in any given stretch, and yet they're so overflowing with emotion that it feels like everything is happening. Here, there are actual significant events (multiple robberies, a hit-and-run, various beatings) quite often, and yet it feels like nothing's happening.

The backwoods intrigue and the grave mood are achieved not through grounding details and eccentricity, but by portent. Some scenes are such slow, ambiguous dialogues that they recall the heyday of Audrina and Justin Bobby.

As a six-episode project, you’d expect precision, compactness and speed; instead it basically, at least for the first four episodes, wanders toward the inevitable.