​SundanceTV began rolling out its new look on-air and online this week, giving viewers a first taste of a larger rebrand meant to better reflect the content mix found these days on what was once Sundance Channel.

Network president Sarah Barnett told Brief that with the premiere of new drama “The Red Road” February 27, it seemed like a fortuitous time to pull the trigger on the switch, since it allowed them to connect a series her team is very proud of, with the new branding that reflects SundanceTV’s identity.

And what is that identity?

“It’s a little bit sexy, a little bit charismatic, and a little bit of an outlier,” Barnett said.

“The Red Road,” is SundanceTV’s second full-length series, and it’s coming as the network has been riding a wave of critical praise for “Rectify” (it’s first full-length series), and “Top of the Lake,” a co-prod with the BBC that earned a Golden Globe for star Elisabeth Moss.

While SundanceTV still has a healthy rotation of independent films on its schedule, the rebrand also reflects the network’s beefed-up slate of original series.

Aside from “The Red Road,” “Rectify,” and “Top of the Lake,” SundanceTV will also air the second season of the French supernatural drama “The Returned” later this year, along with “The Honourable Woman,” starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.

“This is truly about realizing Robert Redford’s vision for us, and it’s really about realizing our fate as a television network,” Barnett said.

SVP of Marketing Monica Bloom said that Sundance is already known as a brand that “is an intelligent and quality purveyor of storytelling.”

But she said that that there was a desire to see what more Sundance as a brand could bring their viewers and “how daring we could be.”

Bloom and her team worked with Johnson + Wolverton to develop the brand story for SundanceTV, with the new creative and visual pieces coming into place last Fall.

“SundanceTV is an incredibly charismatic rule-bender,” said Johnson + Wolverton Creative Director Alicia Johnson.

She described the two main elements of the new on-air identity: the “story cursor” and the “Heritage S.”

The story cursor appears on the screen like, well, a blinking cursor on a computer screen. In a sizzle reel provided by the network, it hovers like a writer looking for it’s thoughts, before the network name or other type appear on screen. Words are highlighted, deleted, and re-arranged, as if someone were writing a story on your TV screen.

The Heritage S takes the first letter of the classic Sundance logo and transforms it into a moving element. It rotates, fades and morphs as it facilitates transitions from one on-air moment to the next.

“The story cursor is the beginning of the story. It’s the writer’s imagination,” Johnson said. The Heritage S “reminds us of the storyteller at the heart of the brand.”

Bloom said that the new name also reflects a practical need: the old name was just too long.

“In the past our logo, frankly, didn’t translate very well onto multiple screens,” Bloom said.

With the new look already present on-air and online, Bloom says that they will roll out to paid-digital and off-channel media next week. They’ve already gotten outdoor exposure with the campaign for “The Red Road.”

And for anyone waiting for a larger marketing push heralding the rebrand: don’t hold your breath. The choice to wrap the new look into a campaign for a series was deliberate. There will be no chest-thumping parties unveiling the new logo. That’s just not how SundanceTV rolls.

“We weren’t interested in doing an image campaign. For us, that feels like it doesn’t connect with what we’re about,” Barnett said. “Our brand is always going to be about stories.”

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