Even though I can certainly see why people liked this series -- the acting is good and the plot/mystery is engrossing -- at the same time I see why I intuitively avoided it for so long.
It's Jane Campion. She seems unable to make any film without bringing to it a kind of heavy-handed Angry Feminism that winds up permeating the whole work and overshadowing any finer points it might have. She did it with "Holy Smoke," she did it with "In The Cut," and she's doing it with "Top Of The Lake," at least in the first few episodes I've seen so far. In this case, the Angry Feminism (as well as Campion's profound misunderstanding of spiritual groups and the spiritual quest in general) centers on a group of women who have created a kind of mini-ashram near a back-country lake in New Zealand called Paradise. The women are all caricatures of New Age Women, and it's difficult for me to believe that even Campion felt they'd be perceived positively. The only thing that makes their struggling attempts at self-sufficiency more tolerable is that they're set against the everpresent misogyny of New Zealand, something that exists in real life, and is worth pointing out and commenting on negatively. One of my good female friends from the Rama days is now a lawyer working in New Zealand, and she has to deal with this kind of backassward male chauvinist shit every day. The fascinating thing for me is that the leader of this mini-cult, played by Holly Hunter in a long, blond wig, is a dead ringer for someone I know. She was also a student of Rama's, and since his death she has set up shop as a spiritual teacher on her own, with *only* women students. She discourages these women from having any relationships with men, and bases her talks on the evils of "The Patrimony" and how it has subjugated women for centuries. Angry Feminism, in spades, and of a sort that even Rama would be horrified by. He taught his female students to be self-sufficient *without* the anger, and *without* the scapegoating of men as an excuse for not achieving more in their own lives. Most of his female students, as I've written about on this forum, took his advice and became both happy and successful in their careers (as did my lawyer friend in NZ). Many of them are now millionaires as a result of following his advice. The woman I'm talking about who runs this "Gotta Focus On The Evil Patrimony" group became a "spiritual teacher" instead, and is supported by the women she teaches to afix blame and stay angry most of the time. Anyway, in the first two episodes, that's what the group living in Paradise in "Top Of The Lake" reminds me of, and is thus coloring my appreciation of the series a little negatively. Campion said that she based Holly Hunter's character GJ on UG Krishnamurti, whom she claims to have met before he died. I met him, too, and if Campion perceived him as being like the character she created for "Top Of The Lake," we perceived him very, very differently indeed. Partly it's the eerie fact that Holly Hunter's GJ *is* such a dead ringer for the woman who now runs the Angry Feminist mini-cult, partly it's the fact that the same Angry Feminism still seems to permeate this series as it did most of Campion's films since "The Piano," but it definitely casts a gloom over the whole series that I don't know if I'm going to be able to get past. I promised myself that I'd be open and try to see in the series all the positive things that other critics and friends have seen, but Campion's heavy-handed "I AM *SERIOUS* HERE AND BY GOD *YOU* HAVE TO BE *SERIOUS* TOO" bludgeoning is getting in the way of me being able to stay open. The whole thing is making even Scandinavian crime dramas seem light-hearted and fluffy. :-)
