Transfixed by tales of lakes and epic marches

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

You’re always wary when a new drama arrives on the small screen already laden down with critical acclaim and heightened expectation – thankfully on this occasion, Top of the Lake lived up to the billing.

This new seven-art drama is set in New Zealand but it’s part-funded by the BBC – so by the time it made it debut appearance on the Beeb here, it had already received its international airing and its instant acclaim.

The pre-publicity was in part down to the cast and crew – it’s written and occasionally directed by Jane Campion, the woman behind The Piano, and it stars Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss as Detective Robin Griffin alongside – among others – an unrecognisable Holly Hunter as a sort of new-age guru of broken women.

The story is a simple one to start with – the drama opens with a twelve year old girl wading into a lake and immersing herself in water up to her shoulders before a passer-by spots her and hauls her out.

The twelve year old is Tui Mitcham, young daughter of an Oriental mother and Scottish drug-dealing father – and she’s five months pregnant and clearly then the victim of rape.

To describe her domestic situation as unorthodox would be an understatement; her father Matt Mitchum (Scottish actor Peter Mullan) is a bad guy straight from central casting. He keeps dogs and has eight foot fences to protect his patch, but in reality if he simply growled at passers-by himself, no one would ever bother him.

He lives beside the lake in the title, and has two boneheaded sons as henchmen as he rules the local criminal and drugs underworld with an iron fist.

He also believes he has rights to an adjacent spot of land, quite understatedly known as Paradise, but then discovers that a commune of damaged women has moved into an array of old artic containers furnished with matresses and a communal cooker.

You see him bear his teeth at these ladies – all of them suffering from addictions that range from drugs to sex – in an effort to clear them from his land, but then it’s to this eclectic community that young Tui flees when the going gets tough.

Then it gets even tougher and by morning she has disappeared, providing the real start of the story for Top of the Lake.

An investigation needs a hero cop, and this one comes in the form of local woman turned big city detective, Robin Griffin, who is co-incidentally home on a visit to her cancer-stricken mother.

 For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.