Revenge, E4

Just when it seemed that thrillers on British television were supplied solely by Scandinavia's finest, along comes a new US series to remind us that when it comes to densely plotted ensemble pieces the Americans have form too. Revenge, the pilot episode of which aired last week and which started a 21-week run last night, has some promising names attached.

She plays Victoria Grayson, who spends her summers in the Hamptons, the East Coast summer playground of the über-rich and a place populated by the kind of people who give each other Van Goghs as anniversary gifts.

It had a preposterous starting point: its main protagonist is a young woman, Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) who seeks to destroy all those who ruined her childhood by framing her beloved father for a crime she believes he did not commit, it opened with a quote from Confucius and had a portentous voice-over: “For the truly wronged, real satisfaction can be found in only one of two locations – absolute forgiveness or total vindication. This is not a story of forgiveness,” she intoned.

Emily, whose real name is Amanda Clarke, has taken a summer rental in the Hamptons in what was once her childhood home. It's now owned by one of Victoria's close pals, Lydia (Amber Valletta) - in fact so close that she's been shtumping her husband, Conrad (Henry Czerny). All three (and many more, for this is a long series, with a lot of people to take revenge on) caused Emily's father to be jailed several years before. In flashback we saw that he died while she was in some sort of corrective institution, but he left her gazillions, which now funds her exercise in revenge.

Revenge is told partly in flashback, and is bookmarked by the two holidays that define America's summer. It started with a murder on Labor Day weekend, when Emily became engaged to Daniel (Joshua Bowman, pictured right), Victoria's beloved son who is studying at Harvard Business School in preparation to take over the family business. The action then jumped back to Memorial Day to show us how Emily had plotted to become part of the family in just a few months.

Emily, while appearing to be sweetness and light, is a woman to be reckoned with; last week she subtly exposed Conrad's affair by making a seemingly innocuous remark to Victoria about seeing Lydia with her “husband” at a country club hotel., where they had met for an afternoon tryst. Last night she asked hedge-fund manager William Harmon (once a great friend of her dad's and her “Uncle Bill”) to invest in a company she knew was worthless; she knew his greed would lead him to gamble others' investments on it to make a quick buck.

I had to laugh when Emily put a red cross through Lydia's face in a group photograph in “a one down, several to go” kind of way; social exclusion really is destruction for people in this milieu, which neatly showed their vapidity. Last night, though, the red cross through Harmon's face was more believable as she wiped $2 billion off his company with her bum steer.

This story of hideously wealthy people is mirrored with one about the ordinary joes who live in the Hamptons; brothers Jack and Declan Porter, who run the local bar where the rich kids hang out. Declan is besotted with Charlotte, Daniel's younger sister, while nice-guy Jack, like so many others, strangely doesn't recognise Emily as once being Amanda, the childhood friend he named his boat after. He, rather predictably, appears to be set up to be the fall guy in the murder and mayhem that follows in subsequent episodes.

Revenge is a clever reworking of The Count of Monte Cristo and Dumas's grand themes of revenge, hope, justice and forgiveness make it more than a little implausible in a modern TV drama. But leaving aside its bombast, it has already proved itself to be neatly plotted and has delivered a few clever twists and turns; it's not The Killing but looks to be well worth staying with, particularly as the latest series of The Good Wife, another quality US import, is about to leave our screens for the summer.

• Revenge continues on E4 on Mondays