‘Shining Girls’ Is an Overlong Showcase for Elisabeth Moss: TV Review

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThere’s a moment late in the run of Apple TV+s’ new limited series “Shining Girls” in which one character puts forward an urgent question, and gets a mind-bending answer. “Is he going to kill me?” one woman asks. “He already has,” the other responds. “Just not yet.”By this point in a show that’s full of such temporal games, audience members may find that their interest has already faded, even as the ending has not yet arrived.

Elisabeth Moss acts in, executive produces, and directs episodes of this adaptation of Lauren Beukes’ novel that hops among timelines — and she does her jobs elegantly. (Other episodes are directed by Michelle MacLaren and Daina Reid, and the show was created by Silka Luisa.) The problem seems to be in the source material, and the way it overlays a format — the short-run limited series that ends up stretching to fill needless hours — to which the TV industry seems to have become addicted.

Here, Moss plays Kirby Mazrachi, an archivist for the Chicago Sun-Times who has lived through the trauma of assault; that incident in her past has left her uncertain what her present even is, as she shifts through timelines.

It’s an unhappy existence in a punishing multiverse, as Kirby finds herself suddenly, say, married to a man she doesn’t recall ever having met, or unable to call to mind fundamental elements of her own story. “These are very basic questions,” a journalist (Wagner Moura) tells Kirby after running through some simple points about her trauma, ones that she can’t answer.