Ferociously intense, remarkably nuanced and completely unflinching, Moss excels as a traumatised, time-slipping newspaper worker on the trail of a serial killer
I understand, entirely, if you are a bit done with murderers – serial, one-offs, opportunistic, take your pick from the array forever before us on our screens. Or simple terrorisers of women. But I would urge, even if that is your current position, to give Shining Girls (Apple TV+) a try, though the premise may be unalluring.
The premise, taken from the 2013 novel of nearly the same name by Lauren Beukes, is that six years ago, Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss) survived a near-fatal attack by an unknown assailant who was never caught. Since then she has been experiencing shifting realities. Sometimes the alterations are small and a pet cat is now a pet dog, or she returns to a different desk at work; sometimes they are large and she finds her hot mess of a mother reborn in a more literal sense than usual as an evangelical Christian, or that Kirby herself is now married to a man called Marcus instead of still isolated and single. One constant is that she is always a newspaper archivist with the Sun Times (her story, which is more central than in the book, is set in early 90s Chicago), the closest she could manage to her ambition of becoming a reporter in the wake of the life-changing assault.
