Television series

Top of the Lake

Name: Top of the Lake
Genre: Drama, Crime, Mystery
Released: 2013
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, David Wenham, Thomas M. Wright, Peter Mullan, Holly Hunter

Jane Campion's New Zealand-set crime drama follows Elisabeth Moss's damaged detective into a missing-girl case that unravels into something much stranger and darker than a procedural. It's atmospheric, unhurried, occasionally surreal, and more interested in trauma and complicity than in tidy resolution. For viewers who want their mysteries to leave a bruise rather than a neat answer.

TVMaze rating

7.7

If you liked this

Happy Valley2014

Sarah Lancashire's Yorkshire sergeant is the same species of exhausted, righteous woman as Robin Griffin, working a case that's personal in ways she didn't choose. Bleak, brilliant, deeply humane.

But The violence is unflinching and the emotional weight never lets up across three seasons.

Mare of Easttown2021

Kate Winslet's small-town cop drags her own wreckage into a case everyone in town has an opinion about. Same claustrophobic sense of a community complicit in its own damage.

But The accents and small-town gossip web take a episode or two to sort out.

The Fall2013

Gillian Anderson's detective hunts a killer in Belfast with the same cool, watchful intensity Moss brings, and the show is just as interested in gendered power as in whodunit.

But It spends real time inside the killer's perspective, which some viewers find unpleasant rather than illuminating.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Keepers2017

Both dig past a single crime into an entire institution's complicity in covering up abuse, and both refuse a clean ending.

A true-crime documentary series about a nun's unsolved murder that uncovers a network of institutional abuse — the same slow, sickening excavation of who protected whom that powers Top of the Lake's second season.

But It's real, it's recent, and the abuse at its centre is documented rather than dramatised — no fictional distance to hide behind.

Broadchurch2013

A tight-knit coastal town, a dead child, and a detective who won't stop turning over stones long after everyone wants him to. Superb slow-burn plotting.

But Season one is excellent; the sequels are diminishing returns if you're chasing that same high.

Sharp Objects2018

Amy Adams returns to her poisonous Missouri hometown to cover a murder and instead excavates her own family. Gorgeous, woozy, genuinely upsetting filmmaking.

But It's more mood piece than mystery — patient viewers get rewarded, plot-hungry ones may get restless.

True Detective2014

Swampy Louisiana atmosphere, a case that curdles into something cosmic and rotten, detectives who are barely holding themselves together. Same appetite for dread over resolution.

But It's a much more macho, philosophising register than Campion's show — long monologues about the void.

Wind River2017

A wildlife officer investigates a death on a Wyoming reservation in landscape as harsh and implicated as Top of the Lake's lake country. Quietly devastating.

But It's a single two-hour gut-punch rather than a slow unspooling — less room to breathe.

Twin Peaks1990

The template for small-town-mystery-as-psychic-wound; Campion has cited it as an influence and you can feel the same willingness to get genuinely weird.

But It swerves into full surrealism and soap-opera plotting that some newcomers find alienating.

Winter's Bone2010

A young woman alone, pushing into a closed rural community built on secrecy and low-grade menace, refusing to be told to stop asking.

Jennifer Lawrence's teenage Ozark girl goes looking for her missing father through a rural underworld of silence and threat, armed with nothing but stubbornness. It's Robin Griffin's investigation compressed into one unrelenting film.

But Very slow, very quiet, and offers almost none of the release a thriller usually promises.

Wake in Fright1971no page yet

Same interrogation of toxic Antipodean masculinity and the violence simmering under 'mateship,' four decades earlier and with none of the mystery-plot scaffolding to soften it.

A schoolteacher gets stranded in outback Australia and descends into a nightmare of masculine ritual and drunken cruelty. It's the older, rawer, more nihilistic cousin of Top of Lake's rotten small-town men.

But It's genuinely gruelling, dated in its politics, and offers zero comfort or catharsis by the end.