The following is from the Top of the Lake Press Kit about the series and log lines for the first two episodes to be shown on 18 March 2013 in the US on the Sundance Channel. Australian and New Zealand fans will see this on the UKTV channel on 25 March.
Lucy is in this episode (3 seconds long..see screencaps - don't blink or you will miss the scene. It's 19:16 minutes into the 1st episode outside of Bob Platt's trailer. Bob is Caroline's husband) but she will be back in Episode 4
Episode 1
Directed by Jane Campion
Written by Jane Campion and Gerard Lee
While visiting her dying mother, Detective Robin Griffin takes on the case of a twelve-year-old pregnant girl Tui, who then disappears.
Episode 2
Directed by Garth Davis with Jane Campion
Written by Jane Campion and Gerard Lee
Robin’s search for the pregnant twelve-year-old Tui in the vast southern wilderness starts to uncover secrets in the small community living on the edge of ‘Paradise’.
SERIES SYNOPSIS
From Academy Award® winning writer/director Jane Campion and the Academy Award® winning producers of The King’s Speech, Top of the Lake is a powerful and haunting mysterystory set at the edge of the world starring Elisabeth Moss,David Wenham, Peter Mullanand Holly Hunter.
Top of the Lake begins with a mystery - a twelve-year-old girl walks chest deep into the freezing waters of an alpine lake in New Zealand. The girl is TuiMitcham, daughter of the local drug lord, Matt Mitcham and his third wife, a Thai barmaid. The girl is discovered to be five months pregnant and won’t say who the father is. Then she disappears.
Robin Griffin is a gutsy but inexperienced detective called in to investigate Tui’s case. But as Robin becomes more and more obsessed with the search for Tui, and questions more of the town’s inhabitants, she slowly begins to realize that finding Tui is tantamount to finding herself – a self she has kept well hidden.
Tui’s story brings two men back into Robin’s life. Johnno, Matt Mitcham’s son, is an old boyfriend who has spent time in a Thai prison for drug offences. Al Parker is a fellow detective and mentor, who has known Robin and her family for a long time. As Robin finds out more about Tui, her world starts to unravel uncovering difficult secrets from her past.
The unusual texture of this world is the Women’s camp at Paradise, a tribe of forgotten, invisible women, forty-five and over, broken-down, disillusioned, ‘unfuckable’. At the group’s center is GJ (pronounced Gee-Jay) sixty-plus with bum-length silver hair and an electric detached air. GJ’s brand of kindness is bracing, aimed at cutting through delusions but somehow her harsh proselytizing ‘soothes’ like a full stop.
Set against one of the most amazing and untouched landscapes left on the planet – a vast, varied terrain, unpopulated, moody, pure and remote where honest work is hard to find – Top of the Lake is a powerful and haunting story about our search for happiness where the dream of paradise attracts it dark twin, the fall.
More news and multimedia (when it becomes available) of Lucy on Top of the Lake can be found on the AUSXIP Lucy Lawless Top Of the Lake Subsite