I always look for originality in a script,” says David Morrissey, “and I hadn’t read anything like it before.”

High praise indeed for Channel 4’s new drama Cape Wrath, especially coming from the actor who made his name in such landmark television shows as State of Play, Blackpool and The Deal(in which he played Gordon Brown).

But what exactly is Cape Wrath? Well, it’s an enclave of smart new clapboard houses, painted in bright pastels and arranged around quaintly curving drives. There’s a distinct whiff of maritime New England. The sun shines brightly on the homes, each fronted by its own perfectly trimmed lawn. Yet behind the front doors lurk people with secrets. Despite their neighbourly friendliness and community spirit, each resident harbours a mysterious past. And nobody is quite what they seem . . .

Cape Wrath is what TV executives call “high concept”. It ticks all the hip adjectival boxes: edgy, stylish, slick, dark, enigmatic, sexy, intelligent, provocative, dangerous and self-aware. There’s an undercurrent of sudden, extreme violence thrown in. Fans of battered faces smeared in ketchup will not be disappointed. I suspect that they will soon be using Cape Wrath at TV executive school as an exemplar of stylish TV drama. What follows, according to the cast and crew I met at a preview screening, are the secret ingredients.

Characters and casting

This is no place for overfamiliar faces. You don’t want an afterglow of associations from other series. Cape Wrath is a Robson Green-free zone. The troubled antihero, Danny Brogan, is played by David Morrissey in his first British TV role since returning from filming The Reaping in Louisiana, and barely a year since his disastrous appearance opposite Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2.

Lucy Cohu, who plays Danny’s apparently innocent wife Evelyn is a similarly smart selection. She had been chugging along happily in series such as The Billbefore her controversial warts-and-all performance as Princess Margaret in The Queen’s Sister led to more interesting offers. Like Morrissey, she is not yet overfamiliar, yet she generates immense warmth, passion, vulnerability and emotional honesty.

The real scene-stealers are the younger cast. Tom Hardy plays Jack Donnelly, a brooding, inarticulatebut sexually charismatic young handy-man who enjoys women’s fear. This cross between Lady Chatterley’s Mellors and a psychotic hoodie is challenged by Brogan’s fearless daughter Zoe, played by Felicity Jones. Oxford-educated, pretty and provocative, looking and playing about six years younger than her real age, she may be familiar from The Worst Witch or Servants. But for Radio 4 listeners, her real claim to fame is as Emma Grundy in The Archers, though you won’t catch a trace of Borsetshire here.

The most complex, mercurial performance is Zoe’s autistic, traumatised, sexually confused twin, Mark, played by Harry Treadaway (coincidentally the twin of the actor Luke Treadaway). Even the more familiar character actors such as Melanie Hill as a blousy northern mum, Ralph Brown as a vicious policeman, Tristan Gillet as the village’s handsome but creepy GP and Nina Sosanya as the residents’ chic controller, seem reinvigorated by their disturbing characters.

The setting

Find somewhere distinctive, suggesting an enclosed world with its own rules. The best-known model for this is probably Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion, where The Prisoner was filmed. The idea that the Government Office formerly known as “Home” would have stumped up to house people on witness protection programmes somewhere such as this is clearly a preposterous contrivance, even in a screen drama. Ray Liotta was condemned to stultifying Nowheresville dullness in Goodfellas, The Fast Show’s Billy Bleach was trapped in a dingy Norfolk cottage in Grass, and in ITV’s Danielle Cable: Eyewitness the real girlfriend of the man stabbed and killed by Kenneth Noye was condemned to live in a dreary little suburban flat.

Although clearly chosen to look both unreal – or perhaps hyper-real – and American, the real “Meadowlands” is an estate called the Lakes at Larkfield, near Leybourne in Kent. The cast seem to have found it rather peculiar. “It’s always hard when a film crew lands in your area,” says Hill. “The locals were nice people but we hardly ever saw them. Most of the time it was completely empty.”

“They are nocturnal, I think,” says Treadaway. “It’s crazy. It looks like a set. You can’t believe there’s a place like that in Kent.” “Normally people hang around and ask ‘Which one’s Neil Morrissey?’ ” says David Morrissey, “but they never interacted with us. There was a strange atmosphere with Astroturf lawns and plastic flowers.” If the series catches on it could have an interesting effect on local property prices.

Style and atmosphere

“I don’t know why people keep saying that,” says Morrissey, when it is suggested that Cape Wrath is influenced by American shows. “It’s a very British drama.” He is certainly right about the characters, their attitudes and the way that they speak. But everything else, including hints of the supernatural and dark, David Lynch surrealism, screams out that this is an attempt to emulate long-running American hits such as Lost, which have been so successful for Channel 4, Five and Sky.

To complement the choice of setting, the skies were artificially doctored to look brighter, occasionally even tropical. “Actually it was ridiculously cold,” complains Jones. The interiors are sometimes luridly lit, and the editing has the fast narrative pace forced on US dramas by the more frequent advertising breaks. The co-producers, Ecosse Films and the US cable channel Showtime, even imported the American director Duane Clark, a veteran of CSI, for the first few episodes.

“Duane named various films such as American Beauty,” recalls Hill. “He wanted that kind of look for the interiors, a kind of Twin Peaksy, Truman Show-ish look. I just think it looks really sumptuous.” The Twin Peaks feel is probably most noticeable in a real motel at the location with a seemingly endless pink corridor used as the base for the residents’ controller.

“He’s very passionate and very demanding,” says Hill of Clark. “On CSI he was used to doing incredibly long days at a massive pace,” says Treadaway. “The quick camera stuff strikes me as very American.”

Concept and resonances

You need one, and it must connect at some level with reality. Unlike many distinctive dramas, Cape Wrathis not the vision of a single writer but a concoction created by the production team. If it has a theme it is paranoia, deceit and mistrust, which is probably quite appropriate for the contemporary television industry.

“I was fascinated by the idea of living a lie in a place where that’s the norm, where it’s officially sanctioned,” says Morrissey. “I think so many people actually want that, and like the idea of having more than one identity. It’s also about surveillance and the way we live in a society where we’re constantly monitored.”

Cohu does not release a primal scream before each scene, he tells me. “Sharon Stone is the only actor I know who does that.” As yet he has no plans to emulate Michael Sheen, his co-star in The Deal, and develop a nice little sideline playing the new Prime Minister. He would, however, welcome another series of Cape Wrath if it catches on. The show wants to be a cult so hard, it hurts, but it will be several weeks before we know whether it has succeeded.

Cape Wrath, Tuesday, Channel 4, 10pm

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