When Top of the Lake arrived in 2013, there was nothing else like it.
Crime drama was all about Luther, Sherlock and Ripper Street’s Edmund Reid: troubled but mighty men who strode about in big coats vanquishing baddies and rescuing maidens.
The Fall tried to redress the balance with an interesting woman at the helm but then ruined it by trying to give viewers the horn with a hot killer dispensing his special, sexy violence. But here was a show not only notable for its profound oddness but one that examined women — living ones rather than the artfully dead variety — in all their flawed and frustrated complexity, each trying to exist in a world dominated by manipulative alpha males.
Now, gloriously, we have a follow-up, Top of the Lake: China Girl, which launches on July 27 on BBC2, in which Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) returns to her native Sydney to investigate a body in a suitcase that has washed up on Bondi beach and, she suspects, is linked to trafficked Asian sex workers.
Four years on, Griffin is suffering the aftershocks of the last case, which involved a pregnant 12-year-old and corrupt cops in New Zealand. Her plan is to distract herself with work, if she can just get past the misogyny that has spread like an STD through the Sydney police.
Robin is puppyishly assisted by a new character, Miranda (Gwendoline Christie), whose height is a source of undisguised mirth among her male colleagues, and who views Robin as a crusading hero.
Meanwhile, another narrative thread unspools related to a teenager, Mary, whom Robin gave up for adoption 17 years previously after she was raped.
In the first series, Holly Hunter was the spiritual sage camping out at the foot of the mountains; here we have Mary’s tightly wound adoptive mother, played by Nicole Kidman, who basks in her corkscrew grey hair and fearsome intelligence, and who is terrified at the future that awaits her daughter.
Where last time around director Jane Campion went with the oddball pastoral vibe, here she goes for urban and seedy.
While the series loses something without the misty mountain backdrop, it’s kept afloat by the same eerie claustrophobia, sparing dialogue and bold performances.
Women are at the centre of this story. Top of the Lake isn’t short of men; it’s just that they are uniformly atrocious. There is the police chief with a dubious grasp of what constitutes sexual assault. Mary’s insufferable boyfriend who, in a somewhat unwieldy coincidence, owns the building that houses the brothel that Robin is investigating.
And the ghastly porn-surfing bros who congregate at a cafe with their laptops, harassing the waitress and cackling over their exchanges with local prostitutes.
It’s all very recognisably Campion: intense, bleak, full of lingering shots and long silences.
There will, no doubt, be viewers who will cry foul and call this vision of manhood at best uncharitable and, at worst, misandrist. But it is a novelty to find women depicted not as passive victims but as multidimensional and — hold on to your hats — not always sympathetic beings. Like its predecessor, Top of the Lake: China Girl is primarily about power, notably how men remove it from women and how women claim it back. It’s also one of the most compelling portraits of womanhood you’ll see this year.
