There’s no doubt about it, Top Of The Lake: China Girl is an extraordinary examination of femininity and motherhood (more on that later), as well as a graphic and explicit indictment of the way men view and treat women, both in the workplace and in society as a whole. I’ve read some reviews of the first episode that stated that it was preposterously pretentious and yawnsome, but I just didn’t see that – I thought it was beautifully paced, often beautiful to look at, superbly and uniformly well performed, and featuring a story that was brimming with quirky, interesting characters and supreme darkness. Yes, Robin Griffin is the type of tortured female detective that we’ve seen a lot of in crime drama during the past five years, but I don’t mind watching another one go on her journey – as long as her reasons for being traumatised are believable and not just tacked on for effect, I’m fine with it because these are stories that still need to be told.
NB. Spoilers inside Continue reading
Hinterland/Y Gwyll has been a huge success for S4C and BBC Wales, and has also garnered a huge following overseas. It’s fairly unique in the fact that it’s filmed back-to-back in the Welsh language and then the English language, which has always seemed to me to be a tremendous undertaking. There’s no word on whether there will be a fourth series of Hinterland/Y Gwyll, but the BBC has announced that a new Welsh crime drama has begun filming, once again in both Welsh and English languages.