With its premiere episode, HBO’s Sharp Objects, a limited series adapted from Gillian Flynn’s 2006 novel, the stage is richly set for gothic goings-on. Amy Adams stars in a glumly captivating performance lined with booze and sarcasm, our troubled tour guide to a community and a story line that can be deceptively quiet and dread-laced, not to mention the missing and/or dead girls.
So why are we compelled not to miss a single episode? Adams’s charismatic powers, in an edgy mode à la her Sunshine Cleaners performance, have something to do with it; we won’t grouse spending time in her world for eight weeks. Stylish and arty thriller tactics from Quebecois director Jean-Marc Vallée are another draw. And you gotta love the vibe of early Led Zeppelin tracks booming in a vintage Volvo.
But there’s a larger contextual backdrop to the appeal. Yes, we are back in a rugged landscape roughly reminiscent of recent television of late, the grisly yet somehow warm and binge-able stuff of Ozark, Big Little Lies (also directed, beautifully, by Vallée), Twin Peaks: The Return, and especially Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Elizabeth Moss’s character in that show, the second season of which was one of last year’s tops of the tube, is a troubled detective with an all-too-personal connection to the sexual dastardliness she is investigating.