Apple TV+’s ‘Lady in the Lake,’ starring Natalie Portman, is a powerful, ambitious miniseries

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“Lady in the Lake” is a seven-episode thriller is based on the bestselling book by author Laura Lippman and features Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram as the series leads. The series revolves around the disappearance of a young girl that grips the city of Baltimore on Thanksgiving 1966, and the lives of two women converging on a fatal collision course. Maddie Schwartz (Portman) is a Jewish housewife seeking to shed a secret past and reinvent herself as an investigative journalist, and Cleo Johnson (Ingram) is a mother navigating the political underbelly of Black Baltimore while struggling to provide for her family. Their disparate lives seem parallel at first, but when Maddie becomes fixated on Cleo’s mystifying death, a chasm opens that puts everyone around them in danger. From visionary director Alma Har’el, “Lady in the Lake” emerges as a feverish noir thriller and an unexpected tale of the price women pay for their dreams.

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From the moment in the first episode of the Apple TV+ miniseries “Lady in the Lake,” when a character dressed as a red and blue dancing mailbox urinates in an alley, clicks his heels, and skips away to rejoin the Baltimore Christmas Parade, it’s clear that the show has a sense of humor and point of view entirely its own.

I’ve seen all seven episodes and read Laura Lippman’s bestselling 2019 novel twice — and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a literary adaptation that departs as dramatically from its source material as this one does.

The result is a work of art in its own right that is rich and layered, nuanced and complex.