The best new show this spring is an original and disarming mystery shot in an unusual corner of New Zealand.
“Top of the Lake” (Sundance, 9 p.m.) will also satisfy TV fans who can’t wait another few weeks for Elisabeth Moss to return in a new season of “Mad Men.”
It’s the tale of a pregnant 12-year-old who goes missing; Moss is a Sydney detective who just happens to be out in the wild visiting her parents when she is called into investigate the matter which includes a terrible person at the head of her family and a strange women’s retreat in the middle of nowhere, run by an enigmatic leader played with some impact by Holly Hunter.
“Lake” is a beautifully-shot and well paced thriller that is also different than most television in its feminist outlook. It’s cowritten and codirected by Jane Campion, who had worked with Hunter previously on “The Piano,” and it has a similar tone to the recently revived and completed legal documentary series, “The Staircase,” also on Sundance (and leads nicely to a third remarkable series of a similar tone, “Rectify.”
There aren’t a lot of series that make me watch every episode offered months before it’s shown, but that was the power of the bewitching “Top of the Lake,” which is so dominated by the striking mountain setting.
Moss calls it “the most comprehensive documentation of modern New Zealand that’s ever been done on such a large scale.
“People are so used to ‘The Hobbit’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ and that beautiful representation of that country. But this, you know, we show a very different and much more modern, much grittier and much more raw side of it.”
By the end of six months of shooting, she said, “you couldn’t pass a place that we hadn’t filmed in. We went everywhere. And when you’re out in the bush or when you’re on a mountainside and when you’re standing in the middle of that freezing lake, you do get to experience the landscape in a way that I think no tourist ever really could.”
“Top of the Lake,” she says, “really captures a side to that country and a side to that landscape that you feel when you’re there, but it’s difficult to communicate. And I feel like you really feel it when you watch this.”
It was all quite a change for Moss.
“I finished Season 5 of “Mad Men” and left about two or three days later. So I was there mid January till the beginning of June. And so I got to experience a lot of the Queenstown and South Island and that area,” she says. “It’s very helpful for me as an actress, obviously, to be planted in that world so completely. And, like I said, I really think that you see that and you feel that we’re really there and you feel that that town and that area is another character in this. It’s a massive character and you really get to feel that.”
Listed as a miniseries rather than a series, “Top of the Lake” runs for seven episodes.