Top Of The Lake
New Zealand is, I suspect, a very different place from Britain. With the amount of people per square mile being significantly lower over there, you can walk for quite a distance before you espy another person, or errant chocolate-bar wrapper.It seems that their television might be flavoured by this less urgent press of humanity. Top Of The Lake (13 July at 9.10pm on BBC Two), a new six-part drama helmed by Kiwi director Jane Campion, takes a while to get started. It’s a good 10 minutes before anything of note happens at all. But once it does, goodness me, you’re hooked.
It’s notionally a police drama, in that the main thrust of the thing revolves around the search for a missing girl and the investigation of a possible murder. But Top Of The Lake has a luscious ‘literary fiction’ feel, where the telling is as important as the tale. It’s a beautiful bit of telly.
It stars Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss as Robin Griffin, a visiting police inspector from Sydney who by chance becomes involved in the case. Once she gets a sense of how slapdash the local cops are, her conscience won’t allow her to let it drop.
Holly Hunter, who worked with Campion before on the 1993 movie The Piano, turns up here as the leader of an all-woman hippy commune encamped on the shores of the titular lake. Local ne’er-do-well Matt Mitcham, whose every word is freighted with potential menace, doesn’t want them there. From a very slow beginning, I get the feeling that Top Of The Lake will build to an explosive, and unmissable, climax.
NOT TO BE MISSED
THE AMERICANS (ITV, Saturdays, 9:45pm) This suburban spy drama is one of ITV’s classiest buy-ins. It is splendidly cast and relentlessly plotted.
COUNT ARTHUR STRONG (BBC Two, Mondays, 8:30pm)
The dyspeptic former thespian has finally transferred from Radio 4. Father Ted writer Graham Linehan gives extra sharpness to creator Steve Delany’s very funny ideas.
LUTHER (BBC One, Tuesdays, 9:00pm)
Idris Elba’s gritty detective goes from strength to strength in this second series.
