Uncanny TV: Estranged Space and Subjectivity in Les Revenants and Top of the Lake

This article explores how two recent television drama miniseries, Top of the Lake and Les Revenants produce moments of the uncanny. I argue that both series produce the uncanny in formal ways made possible by conditions of a televisuality characterized by narrative complexity and a pronounced aesthetic. Both series draw on recognizable conventions of the police procedural genre, but each develops a dialectical narrative structure that rotates between a rational procedural plotline and an irrational, less linear narrative of a secretive community. In my exploration, I conceive of the televisual moment as a form of rupture and draw on Freud’s original sense of “the uncanny” as making strange what was fundamentally familiar. I argue that ultimately each series mobilizes “the uncanny” in distinctive ways, resulting in two endings with very different implications.