Apple TV+ is slowly but surely building a solid resume of good shows worth the subscription price, and Shining Girls looks to be like another original series to check out. Apple revealed the first trailer and release date for the upcoming thriller series, and it’s a little stranger than you’d maybe expect.
The premise sounds fairly standard, at least from the start: Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby, a newspaper archivist in Chicago recovering from a recent assault. Eventually, she starts digging into a string of murders, realising that her attacker is behind them all. Discovering his identity and stopping him from harming anyone else is the main goal of Kirby and her journalist friend Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura), but her perception on reality is getting blurrier with each day and Dan’s got his own demons to battle.
And then it turns out that the killer Harper, played by Jamie Bell, is actually a time traveller. During the Great Depression, Harper found a house that opens to other time periods, and he can only use it by killing the titular shining girls: women throughout time who are brimming with potential, and the last of which is now actively hunting him.
That’s a pretty solid hook for a short miniseries, wouldn’t you say? The show’s based on the 2013 bestselling novel of the same name from author Lauren Beukes, and was in development stasis for seven years until Apple ordered an adaptation straight to series back in 2020. It’s got some pretty solid talent behind it as well — Leonardo DiCaprio is one of its executive producers through his Appian Way production company, and Moss is both an EP and will direct two of the show’s eight episodes. Not the first two, though — that honour goes to Michelle MacLaren, director of several Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones episodes.
Shining Girls will hit Apple TV+ on April 29 with its first three episodes, followed by a new instalment every Friday.