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Shining girlS showrunner Silka Luisa uses
time travel as a mechanism of control and a way
of demonstrating how one man’s violent impulses
multiply across generations. It serves a similar
purpose in the recent second season of Netflix’s
Russian Doll, which makes the New York subway
a conduit to Nadia Vulvokov’s (Natasha Lyonne)
Jewish immigrant forebears. HBO’s bloody
motherhood farce The Baby, Apple’s sci-fi reckon-
ing with the violence of Jim Crow racism in The
Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, and Starz’s haunted-
housewife horror comedy Shining Vale, all re-
leased over the past few months, use genre tropes
to plunge their viewers into the minds of
characters haunted by oppressive pasts that leak
into the present.
From forced birth to lynching, the atroci-
ties of earlier eras make viscerally terrifying fuel
for psychological thrillers because they actually
happened —and we still feel their reverberations
today. Not for nothing are the protagonists of
these shows all women, people of color, or both.
For them, like their counterparts in a real world
afflicted with virulent new strains of old hatreds,
the return of society’s repressed bigotry repre-
sents the same existential threat that Harper
poses to Kirby. On a series whose purposely be-
wildering twists function as metaphors for the
psychological power aggressors wield over their
victims, the only way to stop history from repeat-
ing is to confront it. This, you might say, is the
method in Shining Girls’ madness.SHINING GIRLS premieres April 29 on Apple TV+i’ve never losT my mind, aT leasT as far as i
know. But if my grasp on reality ever started to
slip, I imagine it would feel much like the expe-
rience of watching Apple’s cerebral sci-fi crime
drama Shining Girls. When we meet our protago-
nist Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss), she’s a
timid Chicago Sun-Times archivist who shares
an apartment with her punk-rocker mom (Amy
Brenneman) and a cat. Then, without warning,
reality shifts. Kirby comes home to find that she
lives on a different floor of the same building,
with a husband (Chris Chalk), whom she remem-
bers only as a co-worker, and a dog. Instead of ex-
plaining the twist, the show immerses viewers in
her disorientation.
What we do know about Kirby is that she was
on track to become a star reporter before narrowly
surviving a brutal assault. Only after she regained
consciousness did the facts of her life start shifting.
Since then, she’s drifted through a series of reali-
ties, which arrive with no apparent rhyme or rea-
son. When a murder occurs whose details match
those of her attack—the assailant leaves objects in
the bodies of his exclusively female victims—Kirby
teams up with hardboiled reporter Dan Velazquez
(Wagner Moura) to not just catch a potential serial
killer, but also make sense of what’s happening to
her. The ingredients of a typical male-misogyny,
female-trauma narrative are all there in this adap-
tation of Lauren Beukes’ widely read 2013 novel.
Yet Shining Girls doesn’t lecture. Instead, like a
number of recent series, it uses genre conceits to
place audiences inside the perspective of a charac-
ter forced to reopen historical wounds.
Although suspense takes hold around the
eight-episode season’s midpoint, the show moves
slowly at first; as frustrating as that can be, it’s the
only way to build a world that keeps mutating.
Scenes recur, with minimal explanation.
Settings, hairstyles, and characters change, often
slightly but always suddenly. Instead of a single
performance, Moss gives a cluster of them, finely
calibrating Kirby’s posture, confidence, and anxi-
ety level to reflect each new reality. The villain,
Harper (Jamie Bell), is clear to viewers from the
start. The mystery is his apparent omniscience
and how it connects to Kirby’s crisis. Because the
show sticks so close to her fractured conscious-
ness, we come to appreciate how hard it is
for her to survive, let alone conduct such an un-
usual investigation.
The only
way to stop
history
from
repeating
is to
confront it△
Moura and Moss
hunt an all-
seeing killerTELEVISION
Losing her mind to
catch a killer
BY JUDY BERMAN