It's a sun-soaked afternoon in Los Angeles, but Elisabeth Moss is shivering. Sitting in the back room at the Pikey on Sunset Boulevard, Moss recalls how cold the water was in New Zealand, where she filmed Top of the Lake, the hotly-anticipated miniseries created by Jane Campion that premieres Monday on the Sundance Channel. "The lake is the same temperature all year round: freezing," says Moss, wearing a loose white cotton dress, her short brown hair tucked neatly behind one ear. "My makeup artist had this black plastic bucket and they would fill it with hot water and I would go sit in it fully clothed to warm up."
It's an odd detail, but it's in keeping with the making of the moody crime drama, writes Jessica Gelt in the Los Angeles Times. Filmed over a five-month period against a staggeringly beautiful natural backdrop of soaring mountains, rugged bush and the omnipresent lake, the setting plays a natural foil to the darkness of the plot, driven by the disappearance of a pregnant 12-year-old named Tui. Moss plays a confused and hardened Sydney, Australia, cop who gets wrapped up in the case during a visit to her cancer-stricken mother.
The mystery reveals itself in unexpected ways during seven hour-long episodes. The length of the series allows delicate subplots to push to the surface, including the story of Paradise, a desolate refugee camp for lost, mostly menopausal women, silently lorded over by an enigmatic visionary named GJ, played by Holly Hunter. Then there's the taut drama surrounding Tui's father, a criminal named Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan) who rules the town and its police through the sheer, rabid force of his violent will. "I think this is Jane's best work. She really thrived in the miniseries genre," says Moss. "It's in the details for Jane. It's all about the secondary characters, the locations and all the weird moments — all the extra things that make Jane a genius. If you cut it down to two hours you'd make an awesome detective story, but you'd lose all that great stuff."
Making a miniseries did, indeed, give her room to play, agrees Campion. "My favorite form is the novel," she says, "which I think adds up to six or seven hours of something beautiful. That's what I was trying to create." Campion recalls how watching the salty HBO drama Deadwood made her realize that modern television was the place for her. "I thought, 'My God, this is so brilliant, I can't believe someone in television is financing this,'" she says. "How wild, what a revelation!"
In contrast, another of the chief draws of the "terrific" Top of the Lake is knowing that it will actually end, thinks Maureen Ryan. Writing in the Huffington Post, she notes that it's not that you're likely to get sick of this atmospheric mystery tale, it's just that it isn't padded in contrived ways to fill out a 10- or 13-episode season. The story dictates the length, not the other way around. "There's a lot of talk these days about the future of television, and that's certainly something we need more of: Creators who figure out what they want to do and then find a format, a venue and a running time that make sense for the specific story they're telling," writes Ryan.
The premise of Top of the Lake is not terribly original, but Campion, who also wrote many of the episodes, puts her distinctive stamp on the miniseries' core ingredients. There's the missing child, a community full of secrets and a driven detective with a fiance she's largely forsaken, but the similarities to AMC's version of The Killing (thank the gods) more or less end there. "Actually, the pilot of the U.S. version of "The Killing" did a fine job of establishing a melancholy tone, an intriguing mystery and pleasingly ambiguous characters," admits Ryan. "The show ran off the rails soon after that, but Top of the Lake, which has a similarly moody start, only becomes more fascinating over time. That's not to say Top of the Lake is free of idiosyncratic digressions and the occasionally odd segue, but it does a critically important thing very well: It draws you into a specific world and it quickly makes that world's textures, relationships and stakes matter."
Moss plays Robin Griffin, who returns temporarily to her hometown, nestled in some of New Zealand's most gorgeous scenery. The workaholic Griffin does some consulting for the local police department between visits to her mother, and you get the impression that Griffin would rather be working a local missing persons case than dealing with family issues or her past. In this beautiful backwater, one clan seems to have cornered the market on thuggery and black-market activities, and as "Lake" unfolds, we learn about Griffin's connections to the rough Mitcham family and about the secrets that have kept her psychologically tethered to the close-knit town. As she gets more involved in a case involving a child, it doesn't take long for Griffin to meet G.J., the American guru who has set up a new commune for women on the edge of the town's lake.
Reactions to G.J. will likely be polarized, thinks Ryan, but Hunter's performance was one of the main draws for her. Her stillness in this role is impressive: G.J. mainly sits in a trailer and drinks coffee, and she occasionally issues blunt advice to her ragged flock in a clipped, distracted manner. Is Campion amused by or affectionate toward G.J. and her gaggle of strange, contradictory women? There's no concrete answer, but the ambiguous treatment of the lakeside encampment - puckishly or accurately called "Paradise" - is one of "Lake's" chief pleasures. Many of the women are fleeing difficult relationships. Griffin, meanwhile, is treated with casual condescension by fellow officers and has her own painful secrets, with a thick skin as a result. As Top of the Lake progresses, however, those barriers start to fall.
Television often tells stories involving oppression and violence, especially violence toward women and children, but it most often uses them to juice up a procedural formula or to launch a melodramatic cliffhanger. "It's rare for a television show to let the consequences of violence and assault play out in complex, nuanced (there's that word again) ways for both male and female characters," states Ryan. "Despite its relatively short running time, Top of the Lake does that. In fact, examining the effects of brutality on those who employ it and those who experience it appears to be one of the reasons for the miniseries' existence."
Campion's feeling that anything goes on the small screen translated to some genuinely brave directorial choices, particularly when it comes to the world of Paradise, the camp by the lake. Here the women live in empty shipping containers and there is a sense of weird, wind-swept desolation that easily conjures Twin Peaks comparisons. "TV is being written, directed and acted for adults," says Holly Hunter, addressing the strange world of the camp. "It's bringing complexity to a lot of different stories, characters and landscapes."
In the case of Paradise, that sense of richness and possibility plays out among women that Campion says are "probably the most unattractive group of women in the world": menopausal and post-menopausal. "But I'm one of them," she says. "And there's a lot of freedom to it. You skip out of all the conventional points of success. You're not hot, you don't have a hot body." Through Paradise we see the vulnerability and power of women, and Tui's disappearance becomes that much more upsetting. The evil embodied in the show, however, is as amorphous as the constantly shifting weather. "Even though there are people who do very bad things in Top of the Lake, those people still get a lot of humanity shined on them through Jane and Gerard Lee, her co-writer," says Hunter. "I think they both love people and they love all their characters."
It had been a long time since Campion had written with Lee, who she says was living on an island off Brisbane in Australia when she called on him to collaborate. His voice was vital because he could awaken the male point of view alongside her female point of view. Sexuality and sex roles are a bit murky, along with just about everything else in Top of the Lake. That's certainly true when it comes to Moss' Robin, who has held onto bleak secrets that have twisted her to hardened extremes. Thanks to her role as Peggy Olson on Mad Men, Moss knows a thing or two about infiltrating male-dominated worlds.
Although Griffin is quite different from Peggy - she's tougher and more physically brave - she shares that character's resilience and intelligence. As is often the case on Mad Men, Moss' role in Top of the Lake frequently requires her to react to others and to experience pain and regret in silence, and we know from five seasons of the AMC show that the actress is a master of those skills. She and the subtle David Wenham, who plays a local detective, are well paired; each actor innately understands the slightly hushed, realistic atmosphere Campion is trying to create. Griffin doesn't particularly want to be liked, but given who's playing her, it's impossible not to care about the toll this case begins to take on the detective.
Campion says Moss wasn't who she had in mind when she was writing the role but that it quickly became apparent during casting that she was the correct choice. "I always want to know more about her," says Campion of Moss. "She's a bit like the Mona Lisa, she shows you something, but there's so much more." For her part, Moss says she was both thrilled and terrified to carry the show. But it wasn't until filming was over that she realized the full scope of what they had made. "They showed this clip they edited together at the end of filming, and by the end tears were just streaming down my face," says Moss. "It was like watching my life for the past five months being played back at me."
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