Lady in the Lake, Apple TV+ review - a multi-layered Baltimore murder mystery

Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.

Set in Baltimore, the story is filtered through separate though overlapping perspectives, personified by the twinned leading characters Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first TV role) and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).

Maddie is a Jewish housewife and mother from suburban Pikesville, who seems, superficially, to be living the American dream. Her husband Milton is a wealthy lawyer who likes his home to be run on orthodox, and indeed Orthodox, lines, while Maddie is a pillar of the local synagogue. However, all is not what it may seem, and the calm is abruptly shattered when the Schwartz household assembles for Thanksgiving dinner.

Maddie has been thrown into mental turmoil by the news that a young girl, Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle, pictured left), has gone missing, and we learn that Tessie’s father had been an admirer of Maddie way back when. When she serves the Thanksgiving lamb on the wrong dishes, her husband angrily declares it to be uneatable and throws it away. Rather startlingly, this prompts his wife to decide that it’s high time she left the family home to follow some of the unrealised dreams of her youth, notably an ambition to make a career in journalism.

As for Cleo, she’s torn between the lowlife world of nightclubs and racketeering and wanting to do something constructive that might make a difference. Thus, she’s working as a volunteer for Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson), Maryland’s first black state senator, and hoping this will turn into a permanent job. Meanwhile she makes a living as a department store model, and is also employed as bookkeeper for Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), who runs lucrative gambling rackets and manages nightclubs like The Pharaoh.

In various ways, both women will be intricately bound up with the fate of the luckless Tessie. It’s Maddie who feels the shock of it most violently, when her hunch about where the girl might have gone is borne out by her discovery of her body, but there are many miles of bad road to be covered before we reach the climactic episode seven.

It’s a story about different kinds of imprisonment. Cleo (pictured below), a woman of ability and ambition, finds herself dragged back by a vicious underworld that won’t pull its hooks out of her. Purely at random, she’s forced to drive a car-load of gangsters planning a murderous home invasion, and the outcome hangs over her like a private armageddon.Maddie, meanwhile, rents a cheap apartment and sets about belatedly becoming the intrepid investigative reporter she pictured herself as when she ran the school newspaper. This provokes sneers from her cold and judgmental son Seth (Noah Jupe), who ridicules her “phony adventure in Negro town”. But Maddie presses on, figuring that her closeness with the Durst family gives her an edge in the investigation of Tessie’s death. She makes a beeline for the newsdesk of the Baltimore Sun (where both author Lippman and her husband, The Wire creator David Simon, once worked). Here, she finds her self butting up against the monolithic chauvinism of the journalistic profession, almost comically personified by Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), the paper’s grotesque, bullying slob of a crime reporter.

Maddie’s Jewish milieu is sketched in with an observant eye for its rigid framework of rituals and expectations, generously sprinkled with Hebrew. The demi-world of Gordon and his thuggish associates is a little less convincing, with Jennifer Mogbock drawing the short straw as junkie-chanteuse Dora Carter who can barely stand up onstage but undergoes a mystical transformation when the band starts playing. And it’s not even as if the band is that good.

Predictably, too, the Baltimore cops are playing both sides of the line and are about as trustworthy as a three-dollar bill. But while it has its flaws, Lady in the Lake is a memorable and ambitious chunk of TV.

• New episodes are released on Apple TV+ each Friday

• More TV reviews on theartsdesk