Drowned out: David Wenham says he was embarrassed by the ABC's decision to not co-produce <i>Top of the Lake</i>.

Drowned out: David Wenham says he was embarrassed by the ABC's decision to not co-produce Top of the Lake.

Many mysteries lurk in Top of the Lake, the impressive new mini-series that has brought filmmaker Jane Campion back to television for the first time in decades. Most of them will be answered during the course of the six hour-long episodes that are screening. One, however, will endure: why isn't this top-line drama on the ABC?

The story of a missing pregnant 12-year-old girl and the rural New Zealand community she has fled, Top of the Lake is airing on Foxtel's UKTV channel. It's an impressive production for an imprint that devotes a fair amount of time to British soaps such as Emmerdale and the obviously indestructible Coronation Street. What is the ABC screening at 8.30pm on Sundays? The genial 1950s English melodrama Call the Midwife.

Top of the Lake is co-produced by the Sundance Channel in the US and Britain’s BBC Two. The ABC was in line to complete the co-production, but pulled out when the lead role of the Sydney-based detective, who leads the search in the small town where she grew up, was given to American actor Elisabeth Moss (who plays Peggy Olson in Mad Men). They wanted a second Australian actor to join David Wenham, who plays local police chief Al Parker. And so UKTV replaced the ABC.

Wenham himself summed up the disappointment of many with the decision when he told TV Tonight that he was ''embarrassed'', saying that ''this is a major project and, one would imagine, a piece to see through the year. Wouldn't you want to do everything you could to actually secure that project?'' He's right. And the quality of Top of the Lake only exacerbates the ABC's error in judgment.

The series is visually stunning, contrasting ragged, incomplete lives with dauntingly immense landscapes that dwarf the characters' individual concerns.

Laketop is a beautiful but unforgiving locale, and its inhabitants reflect the landscape's divergent, sometimes destructive, demands. A running time of about seven hours allows Campion to explore the characters and the settings in full.

She's created a vivid centre of threatening force in Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan), the local heavy and the father of the missing Tui (Jacqueline Joe), while Jude (Robyn Nevin), the mother of Robin (Moss), is preparing herself to calmly exit the same world that Matt believes he can control.

Sexual violence, the threat of which is a recurring element in Campion's work, lingers throughout the series, sometimes openly. One perfectly framed shot in the first episode positions Moss in profile by a wall in her mother's home that clearly once had a fist go through it. Robin's own youth in Laketop, and her relationship with Matt's exiled son, Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), may also have been marked by an incident of equally vile force.

The appeal of the show lies in its ability to draw out differing strands of the one environment. Almost as if they're karmic retribution, a woman's retreat has sprung up on land long coveted by Matt Mitcham, and the gulf between the simmering Scot actor and Holly Hunter's GJ, the screwball American oracle who could be an incarnation of Patti Smith, is both confronting and amusing.

''You've got a time bomb in there,'' GJ tells Tui the day before the girl disappears, and that description of a pregnancy sums up the elemental force and arresting unease that flows through Top of the Lake.

It's not meant to carry on for season after season, like a Breaking Bad, but that makes Top of the Lake self-contained, precise and capable of unusual feats. In the second episode, Wolfgang Zanic (Jacek Koman) gives a tortured and fascinating monologue about a moment of attraction that would last his character a lifetime; it was a scene that could have come from a Vladimir Nabokov novel. Let me know when Call the Midwife achieves the same.