‘Lady in the Lake’ Series Premiere Recap: Two Gentlewomen of Baltimore

“They say,” the narration begins, “until the lion tells its story, the hunter will always be the hero.” Crime stories, true or otherwise, often bear this out; you don’t have to be an aficionado to notice that, but it helps. I once spent an unhappy time in my life learning about serial killers, and one fact kept stopping me short: While the killer’s story begins when he starts killing, the victim’s story ends at the same time. Killers take away a person’s right to tell their own story, in their own time.

Based on the novel by Laura Lippman , creator/writer/director/co-editor Alma Har’el’s Lady in the Lake aims to redress this problem. “Aims” may be understating it: From the very first lines, spoken by a woman who’s talking to you from beyond the watery grave we’re watching her get dumped into, Lady takes a damn sledgehammer to the killer-centric narrative. It’s not subtle, is what I’m saying. But maybe it shouldn’t be.

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Moses Ingram stars as the show’s late narrator, Cleo Johnson. Cleo is a hard-working Baltimore single mother of two who works as a department store window model by day — a living mannequin, more or less — and a bookkeeper-slash-bartender in the private club of big-time mobster Shell Gordon (the wonderful Wood Harris, who you may recall having played a Baltimore crime boss on some show or other before). Her estranged husband, Slappy (Byron Brothers) is a failed comedian; their younger son Lionel (Samir Royal) has sickle cell anemia, and their older son Teddy (Tyrik Johnson) is falling in with the wrong crowd, i.e. guys who work for his mom’s own boss.

After Cleo shouts down some disruptive “legitimate businessmen” while volunteering for local politician Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson), Cleo earns her boss’s ire. “Mr. Gordon,” as everyone calls him, opposes the woman’s candidacy, and those guys were heckling her on his orders.

But Cleo’s job working at Mr. Gordon’s club isn’t all bad, and not just because Har’el films it in sumptuous period-atmosphere-drenched long takes like Scorsese filmed the Copa in GoodFellas . Cleo attracts the attention of a handsome cop, Ferdie Black (Y’lan Noel), a regular who comes to the gangster hotspot just to enjoy the music. (This is a bit like reading Playboy for the articles, but at least he admits he enjoys “the view,” meaning Cleo.) And she gets to work with her glamorous friend Dora Carter (Jennifer Mogbock), a soul singer who enjoys sex, heroin, and cover versions of “Where Did Our Love Go” so hot they could create some kind of fire hazard for the nightclub.

But there’s a parallel story here, featuring the woman to whom dead Cleo address her narration. That would be Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), an upper-middle-class Jewish housewife from a different side of Baltimore. She’s tied to Cleo in two ways that we know of so far. First, Maddie coincidentally buys the yellow dress Cleo is wearing in the shop window on Thanksgiving Day, because her own yellow outfit was stained by brisket blood. (Portentous!)

Second, and more importantly, there’s the case of Tessie Durst (Bianca Bell), an adorable little girl from a comparatively devout Jewish family who goes missing during the big Thanksgiving parade after wandering into a tropical fish store to browse for the seahorse she wants for Hanukkah. Tessie quickly meets two of the weirdest grown men you’d ever want to encounter.

The first is a worker at the shop (Dylan Arnold) who couldn’t seem like more of a serial killer if he put on Jeffrey Dahmer glasses and started writing cryptic letters to the newspaper. The second is Reggie Robinson (Josiah Cross), a conspicuously friendly fish enthusiast with either drooping eyelid or a hell of a shiner. In addition to being a fish weirdo, Reggie, it so happens, is both Dora’s lover and one of Shel Gordon’s top men. (It’s too dark for me to tell if he’s also the guy who dumps Cleo’s body in the lake, but for what it’s worth I didn’t see his tell-tale eye amid what I could make out in the murk.) Reggie also gets very nervous when Officer Black starts talking about the missing Jewish girl, then immediately flushes the tropical fish he bought in Tessie’s presence down the toilet. Is he hiding evidence that he did it, or hiding evidence he knows will make it look like he did it?

Maybe this will answer your question:

Who is this evil Santa? Is he even real, or the figment of a dying and terrified child’s nightmares? I can tell you who he’s not: a Black guy with a black eye.

Anyway, when word of Tessie’s disappearance reaches Maddie, to say she takes it hard would be an understatement. She used to date the girl’s father Allan (David Corenswet, future Superman) — or “date,” if her reluctance to talk about it and some very telling but very brief flashback snippets are to be believed. (The digital de-aging of Portman is almost frighteningly well done, but I guess it’s easier when you were one of the most filmed teenagers of your era and have a backlog of material to work from.)

Possible explanations for what happens next: suddenly unearthed trauma; extended contemplation of the paths not taken; legitimate distress over an endangered child; the pressures of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner; her obnoxious local-anchorman dinner guest Wallace White (Charlie Hofheimer); the thousand little insults and injuries of a placid but unfulfilling marriage to her husband Milton (Brett Gelman); or all of the above. Whatever it is, Maddie cracks. After a fight about accidentally putting the brisket on a dairy plate nearly turns into a Curb Your Enthusiasm –style tug-of-war over the food, Maddie smashes a plate, then smashes apart her life.

She quickly packs a suitcase and leaves her husband and her teenage son, Seth (Noah Jupe), without an explanation. She rents an apartment in the Bottom, an area of the city different in every respect from her own largely Jewish community. (“You don’t look Jewish at all!” says a lady at the department store earlier in the episode, a racist backhanded compliment that also echoes the ugliest moment in Cabaret . ) With the help of Judith Weinstein (Mikey Madison), her landlord’s genial stoner daughter, Maddie sets out to join the search party for Tessie — and finds her, frozen nearly solid.

That’s the end of the episode, but it’s only the beginning of my questions about Maddie and Cleo — and that’s despite the structural predictability of some of the material. Ever since I read this brilliant essay by Elizabeth Alsop about the ubiquitous “trauma backstory” — aka the One Terrible Thing in a prestige-TV character’s past that explains the state of their life as we know it, often doled out to the audience in bits and pieces throughout the season until the the final wallop of a revelation produces extra dramatic juice near the end — I both can’t unsee these things and find myself highly annoyed by them.

Frankly, I’d rather just know what happened to Maddie back in the day than play a game of cat and mouse with it. In terms of psychological verisimilitude, I’d wager there are at least as many people who think about the worst things that ever happened to them every day, with clarity, as there are who push the memories aside and allow themselves to see them only in glimpses. Honestly, this is one place superhero movies and TV can actually teach other genres: You will rarely see a superhero movie or TV show that waits too long to tell you that Superman’s planet exploded, that Bruce Wayne’s parents got shot, that Peter Parker let some guy kill his uncle because he was too high off the thrill of defeating “Macho Man” Randy Savage, etc. Get on with it!

And yet, like I said, I wonder. What could cause a woman like Maddie to snap so suddenly and dramatically, with seemingly little warning? She complains that she’s spent her life as a servant instead of a person, but it’s unclear how much this complaint has been communicated to anyone before, if ever. Why is she so drawn to the Tessie Durst case? Are the two phenomena related at all?

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And what about Cleo? The questions begin with her impending death, the watery aftermath of which we’ve already seen. Is it political? Mob-related? The work of a serial killer? Is it connected to the Tessie Fine case — and thus to Maddie’s investigation — by anything more than coincidence?

But more importantly, Cleo is living a full and interesting life now . What is it going to feel like, as a viewer, to become engrossed in this woman’s story, in the cast of eccentric characters around her (Maddie, it’s universally acknowledged, doesn’t have friends), only to have it all yanked away? I’d imagine that is exactly the question Har’el, Lippman, Ingram, Portman, and company really want us to ask.

Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about TV for Rolling Stone , Vulture , The New York Times , and anyplace that will have him , really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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