In "Shining Girls," premiering Friday on Apple TV+, Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby Mizrachi, a Chicago newspaper archivist who, having survived a brutal attack six years earlier — we are in 1992 — is brought out of her cocoon when the body of another woman is discovered with similar wounds. It brings her into a rocky partnership with Dan Velasquez (Wagner Moura), a reporter working his way back from an alcohol-tinged personal low point — "Dan doesn't break stories, he chases them," someone will say of him — as they set out together to crack the case, going where the police don't care to go.
Without putting too fine a point on it, lest one be accused of revealing a plot mechanism that in any case becomes implicitly obvious early on, viewers who have seen both series will be excused for thinking back a week and a half to "Russian Doll," with which "Shining Girls" shares an interest in time travel, cosmic remodeling and quantum physics, as well as a compact heroine getting a handle on her life.
"He's everybody, he's nobody, he's all the time," Kirby says of her assailant, whose face she never saw.
