The six-part crime drama, inspired by the landscape near the Routeburn Track which the Academy Award-winning New Zealand film-maker Jane Campion found 15 years ago, is set to premiere on BBC Two on Saturday.
Co-directors Campion and Garth Davis with up to 200 cast and crew members, including stars Elisabeth Moss and Holly Hunter, filmed on location in the Wakatipu over four months last winter.
Residents will recognise landmarks including Moke Lake, the Glenorchy township and hotel, the Glenorchy-Paradise Rd Bridge, the Glenorchy-Queenstown Rd, Marine Parade, lower Beach St, inside Avanti restaurant, the Post Office Precinct and the entrance to Queenstown Primary School, while Routeburn, Greenstone and Lake Sylvan are name-checked.
Top of the Lake had its European premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February after its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It was first seen by New Zealand viewers on UKTV in late March.
The Guardian interviewed Moss last week and said the series ''has the basic structure of a procedural thriller, but the cinematographic depth of a Terrence Malick film and narrative dynamism of a Dickens novel.
''But above all, this is a Jane Campion production. Her signature - regardless of form - has always been about revealing the too-rarely explored core fierceness in women''.
Moss, who won a Critics' Choice Television Award for the role last month, told the newspaper she was buoyed by images of other ''physically small, feminine-looking women'' who have played detectives, specifically Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs and Mireille Enos in The Killing.
''They're not the stereotypical idea of what you'd think of as a cop or a detective, they're very intellectual and very emotional,'' she said.
''Ultimately, it wasn't about being tough or hard or a detective, it became about being her. It became about creating a person who was unique and different.''
Campion told The Independent the series is a ''scandal melodrama''. The newspaper last week went on to tell readers it is set amid ''the majestic scenery of New Zealand's South Island - the same location where Peter Jackson filmed The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy.
''We came after The Hobbit, and the locals were a bit disappointed because our purse was a lot smaller,'' Campion jokes in the article.
