Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lady In The Lake’ On Apple TV+, Where Natalie Portman Is A Former Housewife Who Investigates Two Deaths In 1960s Baltimore

We don’t ask for much from TV show creators and showrunners. Just give us interesting characters and a story that’s worth following. The more tricks the showrunners use, the more chance that storytelling is going to miss the mark. A new Apple TV+ series definitely takes a few storytelling detours, but its two lead performances are compelling enough for us to go in this ride with them.

Opening Shot: A shot of a dark body of water and a city skyline at night. A man has a dead body in a rowboat. A voice says “They say, until the lion tells his story, the hunter will always be the hero.”

‘Lady in the Lake’ Episode Guide: How Many Episodes in Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram’s Apple TV+ Series?

The Gist: The woman talking is Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram); she’s talking about how, after she was murdered and her body was found in a lake, she became known simply as “the lady in the lake.” But she refers to another woman, Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), by saying “You came at the end of my story, and turned it into your beginning.”

Flash back a month, to Thanksgiving, 1966, during Baltimore’s parade celebrating the holiday. An 11-year-old girl, Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle), wanders away from her family and goes into a store that sells tropical fish. She wants a seahorse, and she asks the man working the store if she knew that seahorses are fish.

Meanwhile, Maddie, who at this time is still Maddie Schwartz, goes into the bustling kosher market to pick up some lamb brisket to make for Thanksgiving dinner. As she carries the brisket home, blood from the lamb drips onto her yellow dress. She sees a dress in the window of a department store — modeled by Cleo — and wants the one off Cleo’s back, since it’s the only one left.

Natalie Portman Goes Full ‘Mare of Easttown’ With her ‘Lady in the Lake’ Baltimore Accent

At this point, she starts to hear about the disappearance of an 11-year-old Jewish girl, but she has yet to find out that it’s the daughter of a high school ex of hers. She finds out the identity of the girl as she presents at a luncheon for the city’s JWF/AJC organization.

As she’s preparing the lamb for dinner, neither her husband Milton (Brett Gelman) or her teenage son Seth (Noah Jupe) seem to be affected by the girl’s disappearance, but Maddie is distracted by the fact that it seems the entire Jewish community in Baltimore is looking for them, and she’s in her comfy suburban existence not doing anything.

The department store gig is just one of Cleo’s many jobs as she struggles to make ends meet for her two sons. It doesn’t help that their father, stand-up comedian Slappy Johnson (Byron Bowers) has abdicated pretty much all responsibility for raising them. At the same time, Cleo is volunteering for a Black female state senator, and she speaks out when cronies of one of her other bosses, a club owner and numbers runner, speak against school integration.

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Maddie, reflecting on a past that wasn’t nearly as mundane as her present, and knowing Tessie is still out there, takes an incident with serving lamb on plates designated for dairy (people who keep kosher know what this is about) and decides she’s done “serving” Milton. She leaves and rents the basement apartment from a jeweler friend, whose 20-year-old daughter Judith (Mikey Madison) seems to be interested in her. The two of them then set out to find Tessie

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take Mad Men -era costumes and mores and marry them to a dreamlike murder story like Big Little Lies , and you’ve got Lady In The Lake . The late Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed BLL , was an executive producer on Lady In The Lake , likely involved in the early stages of developing Laura Lippman’s novel for TV .

Our Take: Cleo’s voice over at the top of the first episode of Lady In The Lake tells you where the show is going. Even though the show starts during Thanksgiving, by Christmas, Cleo is dead and Maddie is looking into her murder when no one else but Baltimore’s Black press is interested (there’s a shot in the opening montage where we see Maddie reading Black newspapers to read Cleo’s story). Maddie has an interest in both Cleo’s and Tessie’s deaths and she essentially turns her life inside out to get to the bottom of both as a journalist.

It’s how we get to this point that we’re not sure of. Alma Har’el ( Honey Boy ), who is the showrunner and directed all the series’ episodes, certainly has given the show a dreamlike quality that gives us scenes like fortysomething Maddie driving in her car alongside the troubled teenage version of herself. But at times while watching the first episode, we felt like things were going too fast while at the same time feeling as if nothing was really happening. It was an uneasy feeling that made us unsure of just what we’re in for during the season’s remaining six episodes.

Portman does her usual good job of playing a woman who is strong but troubled, someone who wants to break out of the shell she and society have put herself in. And Ingram is also effective as Cleo, who is fighting against racism, sexism, and even people in her own circles that make her life harder, like her boss Shell Gordon (Wood Harris) and her friend Dora Carter (Jennifer Mogbock), a singer at the club where Cleo works.

There are some pretty obvious messages embedded in both sides of this story. But what we want to know is: When the timeline for the show reaches Cleo’s death, and then Maddie starts looking into it, will we keep seeing Ingram in flashbacks? How is this going to be handled? This is more of a case where Har’el’s storytelling is more of a mystery than anything else. It’s not confusing or muddled, but can go in any direction. What that looks like will determine if the series is a creative success.

Is that noncommittal? Definitely. But we’re on board because of Portman and Ingram, and the storytelling hasn’t frustrated us, at least not yet.

Sex and Skin: Not much. Dora is having some booze-and-drug-aided loving before she’s set to go on stage at the club, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: As the camera spins from where Maddie finds Tessie’s body, and pans up to the same bridge Cleo was tossed from, Cleo’s voice over says, “You wanted Tessie’s death to bring you that freedom, didn’t you? But it only showed you the door. It took mine to open it.”

Sleeper Star: Brett Gelman, who plays Maddie’s soon-to-be-ex Milton, is known more for comedy, but he plays a pretty good a-hole domineering husband here.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing stands out, but the overall vibe of the show feels less than real, and not in a good way.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite not really having a good idea how the show is going to get to its destination, the performances by Portman and Ingram make Lady In The Lake worth watching, hoping against hope that the story comes together at some point before the end of the sesason.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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