Little girl lost in Jane Campion's Top of the Lake

ALL is not what it seems in a grim tale of child abuse and murder set in a stunning location in remote New Zealand.

Top of the Lake

A YOUNG girl in a school uniform slowly walks into the freezing waters of an alpine lake framed by a seemingly untouched landscape. She seems strangely curious. The scene is ethereal and oddly enchanting, even though we suspect she is walking to her death, something out of a fairy story.

This is how Jane Campion starts Top of the Lake, her six-hour miniseries about a haunting mystery that consumes a community in a remote, incestuous town called Laketon in southern New Zealand. Campion directs this episode, sharing overall duties for the series with Australian director Garth Davis and the writing honours with former collaborator Gerard Lee. Executive producers are Academy Award winners Emile Sherman and Iain Canning of See-Saw Films (The King's Speech), the series a joint production between Britain's BBC2, UKTV in Australia and NZ, and Sundance Channel in the US. There are big hitters behind this quietly poetic but intensely gripping mystery series.

Campion's haunting opening to her drama suggests the idea of a wilderness paradise always has a dark side, and lends her finely composed story a mythic quality. The term "noir mystic" comes to mind and in some ways the series really explores the notion of transgression.

After the 12-year-old girl is rescued, it is discovered she is pregnant and the police are called, her body becoming a crime scene. When asked by authorities to name the man responsible, she writes on a piece of paper, "no one". Then she disappears into the forest, or possibly she has been murdered - and almost every man we encounter in the series becomes a suspect.

She is Tui (Jacqueline Joe), daughter of the local drug lord, Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan), louche and casually violent and, as you might expect in a Campion drama, unexpectedly sympathetic. (Even though he appears to have erased God's fingerprint from his soul.)

As the local cops, led by the affably ineffectual Senior Sergeant Al Parker (David Wenham), head of the Queenstown police station, prevaricate, social services track down detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss). Based in Australia but in Queenstown to visit her sick mother (Robyn Nevin), she's an expert in child protection and soon becomes obsessed with the search for Tui.

If initially a little out of her depth for all her big-time city policing, she's soon sucked back into the intrigues of a community she had hoped to forget, a magnet for lives in duress, most of them losers. But as she investigates, Robin finds her love for Tui takes her by surprise and she realises the lost girl is also herself.

There is another community, too, in the series, and it is just as dysfunctional. An ad hoc village is situated on a remote plot of lakeside land known to the locals as Paradise. It's property Mitcham has long considered his own: his mother is buried there in the expectation it would one day belong to him.

Now it's a "halfway recovery camp for women in a lot of pain". They are unruly, middle-aged, fractious and desperately in search of themselves, seeking salvation under the eccentric supervision of the white-haired, witch-like GJ (Holly Hunter). She speaks in abrasive riddles, as remote as the landscape to which she has brought her followers.

In the series' production notes, Campion calls them a group of women who feel as if they have fallen off the edge of the earth - older, disillusioned and not really part of the dominant patriarchal community or culture they have left behind. And certainly not of the one they encounter by the lake.

It's such a clever idea for an intense psychological crime show - the story of a pregnant child who mysteriously disappears, set against a camp of crazy women and a redneck crime family struggling over a piece of land called Paradise. It's a setting seething with anger, resentment and brutality, balanced by the riotous, surreal humour of these unsettling women with nothing left to lose.

And the landscape - the geography is really another brooding character - is a place of angularities, shadows and dark moods, or unsettling glaring sunshine, exuding a negative, antagonistic force. It's a wonderful example of Auden's "Great Wrong Place", where despair, alienation and dissolution lead to bad, bad things. And Campion, a New Zealander, understands that violence as a normal element of social life is not unusual in the country's fiction. Celebrated writers such as Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme and especially Alan Duff deal with child abuse, alcoholism, philistine aggression and the tragedies of failing to realise the New Zealand dream.

While so far - I watched the first two episodes at a cinema screening for press and cast - there has been only one murder, that of an easily corruptible real estate agent, Top of the Lake is already a gripping thriller. Its subtext of truculent male dominance subverted by the innate wildness and unpredictability of women is enthralling for crime TV fans. (And for admirers of Campion's work.)

Those at the camp are searching for enlightenment, answers and tranquillity but we know already they will find little of that. And we look forward to that dance, as Campion calls the wary skirmishing between the factions, turning into warfare.

Last year, just before the series was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of its television debut, Campion cited Deadwood, Mad Men and The Killing as inspirations for this small-screen winner. You can see how she relishes the lack of storytelling restraints and the longer story development in the TV series, especially when produced without having to write and structure a screenplay for commercials.

It really is like a novel, a claim made for many new series in this era of so-called "arc TV". And like the unlimited re-reading that's associated with serious writing, you watch knowing you are probably missing things and you will need to go back and view episodes again to feel fully satisfied.

Some reviewers, perhaps led by Campion's own observations, have compared the series somewhat erroneously to The Killing (I think she was referring only to a long-form cop series featuring a female protagonist), but Campion is not ultimately interested in crafting a story of such technical expertise that the quality of suspense overturns psychology.

The Killing was almost unbearable in its creation of red herrings and reversals of our assumptions of guilt and innocence. What we learn of Campion's characters, as yet anyway, is never superseded by the viewer's assumption that the next set piece has the power to reverse our expectations. She establishes from the beginning a kind of lush, evocative sensory effect, allowing you to invent your own narrative as hers unfolds in its own time and at its own pace.

The ensemble performances are all perfectly pitched, understated and restrained. Wenham, these days wearing a slightly beat-up maturity, so far has had little to do as Parker but mooch around the Queenstown locations as the do-gooder but patronising senior cop. But you can't help thinking: just what is his eventual involvement? Will he turn out to have some fiendish relationship with the disappearance? He does seem a little too close to the desperadoes of the story after two episodes.

Moss, better known as Peggy Olson, the ambitious copywriter in the cult series Mad Men, playing just a little against her natural porcelain prettiness, is totally convincing here too, working in a highly naturalistic way that matches the quietness of Wenham. Campion rightly says there's a mysterious attraction about her, "it gives something and it holds a lot back". And she cracks the accent with precise detail, not Kiwi but more of an Australian-British accent, the American vanquished. Her character grew up in New Zealand until she was a teenager and then moved to Sydney and became a detective.

Jacqueline Joe is mesmerising as Tui, a natural spotted at a swimming pool in Auckland, her face bearing a feeling of poignancy, a stab of pain and a realisation of the loss of her childhood. And Hunter holds nothing back as the androgynous GI (apparently, her first reaction to being offered the part was, "Jane, why don't you get Ben Kingsley to play this?"), full of almost comic certainty about the world, brusque and without illusions of any kind.

It's a series that's a perfect fit for pay TV, though it's a pity the ABC passed on the production because of an ideologically biased dispute over casting. It artfully combines the conventions of the dogged detective penetrating a mystery with those of the gothic novel that glories in darkness and irrationality. And Campion seems almost more at home with the latter, happy, I suspect, to acknowledge the presence of the unaccountable in our lives.

MUCH more orderly are two other crime series returning in the next fortnight. Martin Shaw's incorruptible Inspector George Gently and Stephen Tompkinson's intense DCI Banks are both procedural police shows and each in its different way celebrates rationality and our ability to solve the mysteries that threaten us.

Shaw is back this week in 1960s Northumberland with the first of two new feature-length films written by Peter Flannery (The Devil's Whore) and Stewart Harcourt (Miss Marple) for BBC One. They are again loosely (to say the least) adapted from the Inspector Gently novels by Alan Hunter, though the settings have shifted from the Norfolk of the novels to northeast England, the texture of the Durham district especially breathtaking.

While the city landscape is still grimly industrialised, concrete and roundabouts everywhere, the region has a rich haul of castles, the majesty of Hadrian's Wall and the green expanses of the Cheviot Hills and North Pennines. It's an area of outstanding natural beauty and a photographer's dream, with stone-walled meadows, upland dales and tumbling valleys. But unlike, say, Midsomer Murders, the show's take on its setting is as unsettling as the crimes the quietly resolute cop attempts to solve.

Each case in the feature-length episodes pits old-fashioned prejudice and bigotry against the rapidly emerging reality of social change. And Gently, in his compassionate, deeply humane way, deals with issues surrounding racial violence, class privilege, the pill, legalised abortion, the sexual assault of young women and the burgeoning IRA and the security services' response to it. In this week's episode, a schoolgirl's killing brings Gently into the new world of pop and media celebrity when the victim's best friend turns out to be a rising TV star. Gently's offsider Detective Sergeant John Bacchus suspects the dead girl's music teacherbecause of persistent rumours that she was having an affair with him.

The show is so popular - it rates close to a million viewers here - probably, as writer Peter Flannery suggests, because of the fascination we have with the past. As writer LP Hartley says, it's "a foreign country, they do things differently there". It's about how we have evolved politically, socially, morally - or how we haven't. But the gently ageing Shaw must have something to do with it too. He's as good as he has ever been in a long career, gruff and glowering, and he has the best hair on TV now that Waking the Dead's Trevor Eve has disappeared.

Stephen Tompkinson, more angular and driven than Shaw's George Gently, is also back in a fortnight as the stubborn Chief Inspector Banks in season two's three crime stories, also feature-length episodes and screening mercifully commercial-free on Foxtel. The series is based on Peter Robinson's popular crime novels, tonight's thriller an adaptation of the 15th in the series, Strange Affair. Like all his Banks thrillers, there's nothing cosy about it, even if it takes place in picturesque rural England. A new case for the anguished Banks becomes personal after his estranged brother Roy rings pleading for his help as he's "in a bit of a mess". Then Roy goes missing and the police find his girlfriend in her car, shot in the head.

He's also learning to cope with changes to his team, with his feisty sidekick DS Cabbot on maternity leave, replaced by the accomplished, highly efficient DI Helen Morton (Caroline Catz). As always with this series, Robinson's narrative is really the star, spiky and unpredictable, but Tompkinson's portrayal of Banks bends and twists, too. An accomplished comic actor, he's making Banks his own among the many procedural cops around: few struggle with quite as much difficulty to keep all that inner turmoil under some kind of control.

Why are procedurals still so popular? Well they really work off the idea that murderers fascinate us, offering sometimes scary realisations about the link between pleasure and horror. The detection methods of policing absorb us, too: routine interrogation, painstaking scrutiny of bureaucratic records, legwork, the use of informants and, especially, serendipitous trial and error. We enjoy reading about, or watching, police working as a team, gathering and interpreting evidence, rather than trusting in an intuitive individual's brilliance in solving crimes. In the end they kind of echo the dull, repetitive routines of our own work lives.

Inspector George Gently, Saturday, 8.30pm, ABC1.

Top of the Lake, Sunday, 8.30pm, UKTV.

DCI Banks, from Thursday, April 4, 8.30pm, UKTV.