Review: Top of the Lake - Guilt over this cavalcade of excess

From the moment in the first episode that we are taken inside a cafe to find a bunch of young nerds sitting behind their laptops, comparing notes on their favourite prostitutes, something feels different about the new series of Top of the Lake.

It's not the action in the scene nor the subject of their discussion, necessarily; it's more the elemental, cartoonish nerdiness of the characters. You don't have to question what they are going to be like because you already know, from years of nerd-based entertainment: they're nerds.

They are mirrored in their over-the-topness by a series of other characters: a couple of cartoonishly chauvinist Aussie cops who condescend to Elisabeth Moss and Gwendoline Christie over a dead body on a Sydney beach; a cartoonishly obnoxious middle-aged philosopher-villain at the show's centre, who is dating a cartoonishly obnoxious high school student; and by Gwendoline Christie, who plays a cartoonishly similar character to the cartoonish Brienne of Tarth that she plays in Game of Thrones.

The first series had its share of oddballs and a-holes, but so many of this season's characters have such extreme personalities that it feels there's some kind of deliberate ploy you aren't yet able to understand.

We fetishise character nuance in prestige televisual storytelling, because people in real life are rarely simple enough to put in a box, but there's something primally satisfying about watching characters who are so clearly defined by one big thing. They are so much easier to hate, love, pity.

Nevertheless, when you watch those awful sexist cops on the beach, for instance, spouting their scarcely believable, heavily-cliched 1970s-style sexism, you find yourself asking yourself, "Is this bad? Am I dumb for finding this enjoyable?"

You have an out though. You know that this is a series made by serious and thoughtful auteur Jane Campion - she made The Piano! - and that it's the follow-up to a serious and thoughtful series also made by her. Since she is someone who has never done anything either bad or dumb, in appearing to attempt exactly that, surely she is subverting our expectations, making a point, being clever.

What is her point? I don't know. Sky has only made the first two episodes available for review, so nothing's clear yet. How will this cavalcade of excess play out in the rest of the story, which is still rapidly expanding, its multiple plotlines flying outwards from a central sense of unease, embodied in Elisabeth Moss's darkly erratic detective Robin Griffin?

It feels like a risk. It could all go so wrong. It probably won't, but as the show's central mystery death and its various other mysteries and intrigues congeal into a web of viewing compulsion as hooky as anything I've watched in ages, it feels like a guilty pleasure.