Created by Alma Har’el and adapted from Laura Lippman’s crime novel of the same name, Lady in the Lake draws inspiration from two real-life murder cases in 1960s Baltimore. Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), a middle-class mother in an unfulfilling marriage, serves as a bridge between the contrasting social worlds of the two victims: an 11-year-old Jewish girl, Tessa Durst (Bianca Belle), and an unidentified Black woman who investigators believe may be Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), a missing mother of two.
In the opening episode, Tessa disappears while attending a Thanksgiving parade with her parents. Drawn by her fascination with seahorses, the young girl wanders into a tropical fish store, where she encounters the creepy manager, Stephan Zawadzkie (Dylan Arnold), and a Black customer, Reggie Robinson (Josiah Cross). These early episodes, marked by the uncertainties of Tessa’s death, set the stage for the show’s intrigue involving the central mystery.
Complicating matters is that Maddie and Tessa’s father, Allan Durst (David Corenswet), were high school sweethearts who had a sexual encounter at the same lake where, years later, Maddie discovers Tessa’s body. In one under-explored thread, Maddie discovers a painting of a dead woman lying in a lake in the art studio of Allan’s father, Hal (Mark Feuerstein), whom she’s having an affair with, but it proves to be nothing more than a red herring.
Maddie’s struggles as the embodiment of middle-American housewifery in the ’60s dovetail with those of Cleo, a bartender and department store live mannequin who serves as a representation of Black visibility at the time. While picking up lamb from the butcher in the first episode, Maddie spills blood from the meat on her dress. (The motif of sheep recurs throughout Lady in the Lake but offers little beyond generic symbolism.) When Maddie later attempts to purchase a replacement dress, the store staff instructs Cleo to hand over the one she’s wearing.
The stark contrast between how the media and the police treat the deaths of a white girl and a Black woman underscores enduring issues of race and class, but Tessa’s storyline mostly feels like a distraction. The series is first and foremost about Maddie and Cleo, and other women like them, which is reinforced by the final episode, “My Story.” Cleo, in fact, provides voiceover throughout in a way that underlines the parallels between them.
Maddie’s journey toward independence from a suffocating family life, which leads her to a career in the sexist newspaper industry, nods to the burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the era. And her relationship with police officer Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) highlights the persistence of state anti-miscegenation laws. These moments of social commentary attempt to give depth to the narrative, but Lady in the Lake is too cluttered with ancillary characters and tenuous tangents for any of it to land with the force intended.
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