Top of the Lake Season Two More Accessible
Critics loved Top of the Lake, New Zealander Jane Campion’s dark crime drama, starring Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss as Robin Griffin, the police detective tasked with finding out why a pregnant 12-year tried to kill herself in a freezing lake in rural New Zealand. After a long break, Top of the Lake returns this year with Moss reprising her role.
The first season won Moss a Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a miniseries and picked up seven Emmy nominations, including one win for best cinematography for a miniseries for lenser Adam Arkapaw.
Campion is again directing and co-writing the second season, titled Top of the Lake: China Girl, with Gerard Lee.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with one of the show’s producers, Hakan Kousetta, COO of television at London-based See Saw Films, at the annual BBC Worldwide Showcase in Liverpool, to take about the next season.
“It’s a [season] that you can watch without having seen [season] one,” Kousetta explains. “It will be better if you have, because certain parts of the story carry over. I think it’s a more accessible show [than season one], even though there is debate about that. But I just met with our French broadcasters and one of them said it’s so much darker than the first one, but another said oh no, it’s not. It’s still very much a Jane Campion piece of work, and you can tell that instantaneously. She has carried on the themes of motherhood, which was a big part of the first [season] and is explored in much more depth in the second one. It’s about what it means to be a mother in the 21st century in both the Western and non-Western sense.
“It’s a traditional story, a murder investigation, and then there’s also a family drama, and then they come crashing together. It’s very complex and challenging and brilliantly rendered.”
Top of the Lake: China Girl will first premiere on BBC Two in the UK before airing on Sundance TV and Hulu in the US later this year.
Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2016 New Year Honours.
Original article by Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter, April 4, 2017.
