What lies beyond: Patrick Brammall and Rodger Corser headline supernatural thriller Glitch

Is it a paranormal drama? A small-town mystery with an Australian Gothic flavour? A high-concept genre piece? A supernatural tale of The Risen? Perhaps an exploration of our national history, a thriller, or a love story? Whatever you might choose to call Glitch – and those involved offer all of these descriptions – the six-part series is built on an inspired premise that's rich with possibility.

One dark night in the country town of Yaroona (played by Victoria's Castlemaine), six people rise from their graves. They're naked, caked in mud, dazed and confused. At some point, all of them were buried here but, beyond that, no one knows why the resurrections have occurred, why they've happened here, or what it all means.

Alerted to a disturbance at the cemetery, the local policeman, James Hayes (Patrick Brammall) discovers the risen, calls for assistance and is soon joined by the local doctor, Elishia McKellar (Genevieve O'Reilly). He also finds that he has an intimate connection to one of the mysterious arrivals. That bond strengthens his impulse to protect his charges and keep their presence quiet as he tries to figure out what's going on, even as his colleague, Vic (Andrew McFarlane), is sniffing around suspiciously.

Brammall explains that "it's very much an ensemble piece but James is the audience's eye initially, the everyman around whom everything else occurs". Series co-creator Louise Fox describes the country cop as "a Beta male, not an Alpha male. He's not particularly ambitious, he's competent, but not so heroic that he can't be affected, and he's relatable. He's in the prime of his life, but he's also suffered an incredible loss and he knows what it is to grieve."

From the early days of script development, Fox imagined Brammall as James and the actor has enjoyed such a purple patch over the last few years -- with roles in The Moodys, Upper Middle Bogan, The Little Death, Power Games: The Packer Murdoch Story, Offspring and Ruben Guthrie -- that there was no concern behind-the-scenes about his capacity to carry a series. For his part, Brammall says, "I've been really lucky to be bouncing between comedy and drama. It's not a common experience in Australia, but it's what you dream of, getting to play all the shades. And Lou has written this with a really strong story engine. It was a real page-turner, reading the scripts. The first series takes place over four days and five nights, so it crackles along: there's super-momentum."

Fox says that co-creator Tony Ayres approached her years ago with the original idea and asked her to be the showrunner: "I said 'Absolutely', because I found, from the moment we started working on it, it felt like it was just bleeding out story: it was such a great idea. We started on it four or five years ago, before The Returned had come out, before Resurrection. At some point, we heard about a French film that had a similar premise and we tried to watch bits of it on YouTube, in French, but we had no idea what was going on."

The guiding principle on Glitch, she says, has been "to keep it real". Brammall has joked that viewers should "come for the corpses, stay for the heartbreak", while McFarlane adds, "It's dealing with the supernatural, but it's not creaking doors and ghostly figures. This extraordinary thing has happened and we deal with it in an emotionally realistic way. You can do fantasy with lasers and light-sabre fights and dragons, but this is more about these people rediscovering who they were and who they are now. The whole idea of life is dealing with loss, and how do we go on. It doesn't have to be physical loss: it can be emotional loss, or a loss of innocence, sometimes it's your home, or a loss of faith. They're big, important issues.But, being human, short of taking your own action against it, you have to go on. Ultimately, that's our journey."

Fox sees the series as sitting comfortably among current TV trends. "Television is a great embracer of the pulp and the schlocky, but what's happened to television is its ability to absorb it and take it very seriously. Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, True Detective, they all have their origins in a slightly pulpy, schlocky genre, but what's made them so universally interesting is that they're treated with serious drama chops. To me, that's television now: to take any idea that we used to think of as throwaway and think, 'What if I treat it as a dramatist?'