Also known as a "mystery story" or simply a "mystery", Mystery Fiction is a genre where the plot revolves around a mysterious happening that acts as the Driving Question.

More than writing in many other genres, mystery writing tends to follow standard rules. This is because readers of mysteries seek a particular experience: they want the intellectual challenge of solving the crime before the detective does, and the pleasure of knowing that everything will come together in the end.

Mysteries are one of the most difficult types of narratives to tell well, for a simple reason: their narrative structure - which forces the storyteller to invest an enormous amount of the work's merit on the final reveal - easily sets itself up for failure, because the narrative, as found in real life, is anything but satisfying to an audience (typically).

Jane Campion and Jenji Kohan each premiered television series in 2013 that used genre to facilitate pointed interventions in postfeminist representational paradigms.

Top of the Lake, which premiered last night on the Sundance channel, is a police procedural, a genre I often avoid, at least in its popular-network incarnation. (The Wire, for example, I obviously loved.)

The first thing that grabs you about Top of the Lake is the scenery – the beautifully framed shots of the area surrounding Moke Lake on New Zealand's South Island. But beyond the vistas lies an intriguing and boundary-pushing story that is every bit as engaging

Water has a complicated history in feminist thought. Women have been sometimes positively, sometimes negatively equated with water, with fluidity, with that which is not solid or tangible or rational and thus has the ability to flow, submerge, purify, gush … but also drown, pollute or erode

Although the new miniseries Top of the Lake had its world premiere this past January at the Sundance Film Festival, it is darkly fortuitous that it should have its television run two months later. March has seen the emergence of details from the rape of a young woman in Steubenville, Ohio, material so sickening that it almost—almost—beggars belief.

Sunday’s Sundance screening of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake came with the following warning: “This seven-hour program includes one intermission and one short lunch break.”* For the first time in its history, the Sundance Film Festival was screening a miniseries (to air on the Sundance Channel in March) as a cinematic event

Since its early days, television has been considered a writer’s medium, not a director’s. Much of this comes down to structural limits: a writers’ room can grind out twenty-two scripts for a season of network TV, or half as many for a cable show, but that workload is not as feasible for a director.

Top of the Lake sees Jane Campion return to her
New Zealand roots to oréate a miniseries that by
blurring the lines between oinema and teievision,
writes a new ohapter in the ever-evolving story of
the smaii soreen.

Jane Campion, one of the world’s great film directors, has had it with the movies. It is eight years since she last made a full-length feature (the Keats biopic Bright Star), and 14 years since her sexually explicit thriller In The Cut almost did for her career. Now she is having a Norma Desmond moment: she’s still big, it’s just the pictures that got small.

"Television is the new frontier. Film is conservative. I’m sick of it,” says Jane Campion. It is a hand grenade, gently lobbed. That she says it sitting on a sofa in Cannes makes it all the more resonant: this is the same city in which Campion won the Palme D’Or for The Piano exactly 20 years ago.