Serial Killer Thriller Shining Girls Lulls You to Sleep Before Blowing Your Mind

Shining Girls. Available now on Apple TV.

As a critic, I get paid to watch TV shows, which is a lucky thing for Apple TV’s new series Shining Girls, because for its first two and a half hours, it’s nearly unwatchable, even though it starts with a reasonably enticing premise: a couple of reporters trying to track down a serial killer. Slooooow, confusing and riddled with what-the-hell moments, it moves at the pace of a snail on Quaaludes. And then, the snail gets a shot of crystal meth. Shining Girls is an immensely entertaining show, if you have the time and patience to wait it out.

Based on a book by South African novelist Lauren Beukes (which I haven’t read, but friends tell me has been altered considerably in the adaptation), Shining Girls stars Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men, The Handmaid’s Tale) as Kirby Mazrachi, an editorial assistant at the Chicago Sun-Times. Her career was mostly sidelined six years earlier when she nearly died after an unseen nighttime assailant carved a cross deep into her abdomen.

Once a promising candidate for a reporting job, Mazrachi now is just a melancholy and slightly glorified clerk, wandering the newsroom to deliver clippings and photos from the newspaper’s library to reporters and editors who’ve asked for them. (Yes, kids, there was a time—and Shining Girls is set in it—when everything in the world wasn’t available at a click or two on a computer keyboard.)

But as she eyes stories written by just-short-of-washed-up crime reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura, Narcos) about the recent murder of a social worker, Mazrachi notices some similarities with her own assault. As the two team up, they uncover a string of grisly coincidences in killings stretching back