Shining Girls: Elisabeth Moss, Michelle MacLaren, & Daina Reid are directing

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

In addition to executive producing and starring in the eight episode time traveling serial killer series Shining Girls, Elisabeth Moss is also set to be one of the directors on the show. Moss will be directing two episodes, the first two will be directed by Michelle MacLaren (whose credits include Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead), and the remaining four episodes will be directed by Daina Reid (Never Tear Us Apart: The Untold Story of INXS). 

Moss made her directorial debut this year with an episode of The Handmaid's Tale. She has directed three episodes of that show so far, while Reid has directed four.

Shining Girls is an Apple TV+ adaptation of Lauren Beukes' best-selling novel (buy a copy HERE). Created and written by Silka Luisa, the show will be about 

a Depression-era drifter who must murder the “shining girls” in order to continue his travels.

The description of Beukes' novel gives more information: 

In Depression-era Chicago, a drifter named Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women who burn with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back.

Moss is playing Kirby, "a Chicago reporter who survived a brutal assault only to find her reality shifting as she hunts down her attacker". Wagner Moura takes on the role of Dan, "a veteran journalist breaking the widening story of a copycat attack". Jamie Bell is the "mysterious loner" Harper.

Moss and her Love & Squalor Pictures partner Lindsey McManus are executive producing the series with Luisa, Beukes, Alan Page Arriaga, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davidson of Appian Way.