CHICAGO —The 30th anniversary of the Great Chicago Flood of 1992 was two weeks ago, and it was a crisis that submerged the Loop in 124 million gallons of water from the river when an abandoned subterranean tunnel was breached during repairs to one of the bridges downtown.
The psychological thriller “Shining Girls” on Apple TV+ may be fiction, but it takes this moment in history as its starting point: It’s the spring of 1992 and the flood has unexpectedly led to the discovery of a woman’s mutilated corpse.
The markings on her body are similar to the scars left on the body of one Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss, “Mad Men” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”), who works at the Chicago Sun-Times in the paper’s morgue. It’s a department that doesn’t exist in most newsrooms anymore, but it was once the backbone of most papers, staffed by journalists who would assist reporters by tracking down research and past news coverage. Before the internet, workers in a newspaper’s morgue provided a specific and invaluable skill, but “Shining Girls” (adapted from the novel by Lauren Beukes) envisions it as a low-status job of drudgery.
