If you haven't caught "Top of the Lake," a cryptic mini-series on the Sundance Channel right now, you owe yourself a peek, if only to behold and savor Holly Hunter, whose character is a mash-up of Pocahontas, the oracle at Delphi and Cousin Itt from "The Addams Family." She's all hair, her silvery mane accounting for easily half of her body weight and seemingly destined to sweep the ground. Perhaps when the character isn't providing terse counsel to the damaged women around her at an odd spiritual retreat, she moonlights as a broom.
Most of the women at the retreat, built from a network of colorful cargo containers arranged like gigantic Legos on the lip of the aforementioned lake, are on the lam from destructive relationships with men. One is on the lam from a destructive relationship with a chimpanzee as well. Still they can't help themselves. Their eyes rove to the scruffy local lads in the gorgeous patch of New Zealand where the story is set, and in the third of what will be seven episodes, a woman leaves her container to spend the night in the less Spartan digs of a lakeside drug lord. Minor spoiler alert: as she slips into his bed, he announces that he's impotent, and the day after, as they frolic sexlessly in the woods, he stumbles across his mother's grave, kneels in front of it and begins flagellating himself. This is a pretty good definition of a really bad date.
I'm mesmerized by "Top of the Lake," which is now halfway through its run, and friends who are watching it constantly bring it up. And what we're mainly responding to isn't the meat of the yarn, which focuses on the effort to unravel what happened to a 12-year-old girl who is about five months pregnant. It's the ancillary riddles and vaguely explained curiosities, like the interludes in Lego land. It's the gentle pacing. It's the way in which the mini-series, one of whose principal writers and directors is Jane Campion, insists on a certain opaqueness and bucks the bulk of what's on television, even in this golden age of the medium.
"Top of the Lake" belongs to a budding genre that several critics, including Alessandra Stanley in The Times and Matt Zoller Seitz in Salon, have called Slow TV. Stanley sagely noted the parallel to Slow Food, which rebelled against the metastasis of McDonald's outposts. Slow TV pushes back at the instant gratification and empty calories of too many elimination contests, too many reality shows, too many efficient, literal-minded forensic dramas that perhaps keep certain plot threads dangling but tie up the episode's main mystery by the hour's end.
The term Slow TV has multiple meanings, and has been applied to full-length chronicles of actual, incrementally unfolding events, like a ship's voyage, and to the practice of spacing out viewings of a fictional serial's episodes rather than watching them in a marathon session. But I think it's best deployed in the way Stanley and then Seitz, writing about such shows as "Treme" and "Game of Thrones," used it: to describe unrushed, atmospheric narratives.
Slow TV mines the pleasures of ambiguity, which are affirmed, as it happens, by one of the best movies I've recently seen, "Room 237," a documentary in limited theatrical release and on cable TV. The title refers to a detail in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of "The Shining," and the documentary recounts the riot of messages and meanings that obsessive fans have read into Kubrick's lone foray into horror.
It's a testament, hilarious at times, to the human genius for overanalysis. One "Shining" fan points to a German-made typewriter in the movie to support his theory that it's a Holocaust parable; another cites the feathered-headdress logo on baking-powder cans in a few scenes for his belief that "The Shining" is about the massacre of American Indians. A desktop paper tray is determined to be a metaphoric erection, and so on. The abstruseness of some of "The Shining" is arguably a flaw, but "Room 237" reminds you that only an artistic work that resists tidy explanation can accommodate such enjoyable flights of interpretive fancy.
Ambiguity has never been what TV values most, "Twin Peaks" excepted. But it was central to "The Killing," which highlighted an additional characteristic of Slow or Slowish TV, the willingness to wander off the main road and down an intriguing cul-de-sac, as "Girls" did in a discrete episode with Patrick Wilson as a guest star. Another HBO series, "Enlightened," partly redeemed its irritations with its habits of straying, and of lingering: on a sigh, on a glare, on a soulless office building. It cared as much for mood as for plot.
The same is true of "Top of the Lake," which preserves some enigmas, hirsute and otherwise, and surrenders others on its own timetable, making you wait and making you work. Just like life.
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Op-Ed Columnist: When TV Takes Its Time
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