There is something pleasing - in a parochial sort of way - about Hollywood types and Academy Award-winning directors filming stuff in Otago.
That is particularly so for Jane Campion's Top of the Lake, a six-part miniseries starting on Monday, filmed in and around Queenstown last year.
It is pleasing that one of its stars - Mad Men's Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) - has clearly put plenty of work into getting very close to a New Zealand accent.
That, my friends, is a pleasant turnaround from Kiwis going to Hollywood to speak in an American accent.
But it also makes you think.
Top of the Lake features famous American acting person Holly Hunter as the creepily unpleasant spiritual leader of a women's camp of amusingly disturbed women, living a stone's throw from Lake Wakatipu.
They live in containers. I know.
I also know there's a bloke named Geoff at the Queenstown Lakes District Council who would be down there in a flash moving them on.
That's because there are an absolute bucket load of local government laws that are being broken in this scene - laws to do with waste management: camping; resource consent; animal control; food preparation and storage, the list goes on.
And I know Geoff, and he's dead bloody keen on rules.
But let's not get lost in the realities; this is television.
Top of the Lake begins with 12-year-old Tui walking trance-like into the water of the very cold lake that laps at the Queenstown shore.
Once she is dragged from the water, we find she is five-months pregnant, and refusing to tell anyone who the father is.
Enter detective Robin Griffin (Moss), who has returned to her hometown to visit her dying mother.
She begins to investigate, but by the end of episode one Tui is missing - and the drama proper begins.
Top of the Lake has the Wakatipu area washed of colour, cold and creepy.
The lake itself has taken the life of Detective Griffin's father, and it takes another life in episode one.
It sits brooding and dangerous in the background.
Matt Micham (Peter Mullan) is a local drug lord, Tui's father, and a very, very bad Scottish man.
His sons are bad eggs too - they have tattoos.
The show throws plenty of unpleasantries at you early on.
A local real estate agent comes to a sticky end during a water skiing outing he never agreed to.
Micham shortly after dispatches of his dog in a brutal scene.
And as each unpleasantry builds upon the last, a dark tension begins to build.
Top of the Lake begins on UKTV at 8.30pm.
It is probably best you don't miss it.
- D. Charles Loughrey.
