DVD/Stream of the Week: Top of the Lake

Elisabeth Moss in TOP OF THE LAKE

If you’re looking for an episodic drama before you can get another taste of Treme, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Justified or the like, you can do a lot worse than the Sundance Channel’s seven part series Top of the Lake, staring Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss.  It’s just right for a Labor Day Weekend marathon.

Moss plays a cop who returns to her rural New Zealand hometown only to get entangled in the case of a missing pregnant 12-year-old. Moss’ cop begins unraveling the community’s secrets, and it turns out that she has a past herself.  It’s easy to find oddballs and seekers in a mountain community, along with the usual crop of redneck louts, and this New Zealand backwater has more than its share of both.  There’s a dodgy police commander, a slimy real estate broker, a bunch of edgy teenagers – and the protagonist’s old prom date is now living in a tent.

But that’s nothing compared to one of the most twisted characters of recent years, the sadistic local drug lord played by Peter Mullan (the Red Riding series, Tyrannosaur, The Claim).

And then there’s a colony of women living in shipping containers while they heal from life’s traumas and seek enlightenment.   Their sometimes catatonic and always harsh guru is played by Holly Hunter.

Throw all these characters together into a cleverly constructed plot, and you’ve got one highly entertaining series.

Peter Mullan in TOP OF THE LAKE

Top of the Lake was created by New Zealand’s own Oscar-winning director Jane Campion.

Each of the episodes is only 48-50 minutes long, so watching all seven episodes goes pretty briskly.

Holly Hunter in TOP OF THE LAKE

You can catch Top of the Lake episodes on the Sundance Channel or watch all seven episodes on DVD or streaming from Netflix.