CHICAGO —The 30th anniversary of the Great Chicago Flood of 1992 was two weeks ago, and it was a crisis that submerged the Loop in 124 million gallons of water from the river when an abandoned subterranean tunnel was breached during repairs to one of the bridges downtown.
The psychological thriller “Shining Girls” on Apple TV+ may be fiction, but it takes this moment in history as its starting point: It’s the spring of 1992 and the flood has unexpectedly led to the discovery of a woman’s mutilated corpse.
The markings on her body are similar to the scars left on the body of one Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss, “Mad Men” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”), who works at the Chicago Sun-Times in the paper’s morgue. It’s a department that doesn’t exist in most newsrooms anymore, but it was once the backbone of most papers, staffed by journalists who would assist reporters by tracking down research and past news coverage. Before the internet, workers in a newspaper’s morgue provided a specific and invaluable skill, but “Shining Girls” (adapted from the novel by Lauren Beukes) envisions it as a low-status job of drudgery.
We can debate whether that’s accurate, but Kirby’s zombified affect may have nothing to do with her job. She’s still reeling from that scar-making attack from years ago, numb and dissociated from what’s happening around her. When one of her colleagues, a reporter named Dan, starts working on the story about the dead woman from the tunnel, they team up and begin to piece together a theory: That the same man who attacked Kirby (a cipher played by Jamie Bell) has committed this crime many times over — and across different time periods.
Kirby’s hold on reality often feels tenuous, which complicates things further; she blinks and certain details of her life are noticeably different. Suddenly her desk at work is in a different spot. Suddenly her dog is a cat. Suddenly she’s married to that nice photographer at the paper who she barely knows. What is going and why has Kirby been sucked into a vortex of dueling timelines? It’s a premise that asks: What if a serial killer could time travel?
I haven’t read the novel, so it’s a surprise to see book reviews describe Kirby as “barbed and sarcastic” or “spunky.” That’s not how the character is written here. And that’s not how Moss plays her. As envisioned by showrunner Silka Luisa, there’s a dourness that clings to Kirby, who is generally haggard, her brow forever furrowed. Her social skills are not great. She’s been through hell and it’s left her a shell of a person. Understanding what happened to that dead woman in the tunnel just might be the key to bringing Kirby back to life.
But for much of the season, she’s defined by the fact that Something Terrible Happened To Her and everyone around her exists in reaction to that. Her co-worker at the paper is the closest thing she has to a trusted friend — Wagner Moura (best known for playing Pablo Escobar on “Narcos”) gives Dan the quiet intelligence and rumpled demeanor of a man who is haunted by far more prosaic concerns than whatever’s eating Kirby. But if you asked me to describe the other characters who pop up — her mother (Amy Brenneman), her husband/acquaintance from work (Chris Chalk), the woman who works at the Adler Planetarium whose fate might be tied Kirby’s (“Hamilton” alum Phillipa Soo) — I’d come up empty. They’re pieces on a chessboard.
Maybe that’s the point; with all the timeline messiness, often these people feel like strangers to Kirby, too. But you never get a sense of the story’s internal logic. The whole thing feels undercooked and overcomplicated. The show’s vibe is very “curl up in a cardigan with a glass of wine on a rainy day.” But despite the wild swings of the story, the series tends to feel tonally monotonous and can’t sustain a sense of tension over its eight episodes.
Though it was filmed here, nothing about “Shining Girls” feels particularly specific to Chicago. It’s notable that in real life, it is Black women in the city, rather than the Kirby’s of the world, who have been targeted over the last two decades by a yet unidentified serial killer — crimes often treated with apathy by police and local media That’s a big detail, but smaller ones are missing too; Kirby and Dan occasionally convene at a bar but it’s never the Billy Goat, the preferred haunt for the likes of Mike Royko and so many other ink-stained wretches back in the day, being just steps and a flight of stairs away from both of the big papers in town.
In the book, the killer is compelled by the forces of a supernatural house to snuff out young women who shine too bright, hence the title. It’s a boringly reductive premise — that some kind of external force has determined that women must die in order for this man to live — but his motive in the screen adaptation remains murky. Is that better or worse? I can’t decide. Either way, too many threads are left dangling or unexplained. You never get that satisfying feeling of everything clicking into place by the end.
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'SHINING GIRLS'
1.5 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: Apple TV+
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(Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.)
