At the core of Lady in the Lake is a noir mystery about the death of a young black woman in 1960s Baltimore. But the seven-part AppleTV+ show is so much more than a straightforward whodunit. Inspired by the 2019 book of the same name by Laura Lippman, the TV show explores the stories of two seemingly opposite women whose lives (and one’s death) intersect in richly textured ways, first small then large.
Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) is a Jewish, suburban wife and mother who feels stuck in a life she’s desperate to transcend. Cleo (Moses Ingram, The Queen’s Gambit) is also a wife and mother but works several jobs trying to keep her family afloat while searching for her own significance. The show’s creator is Alma Har’el, best known for the shockingly engaging and personal film Honey Boy, and has now given us two of the most intriguing femme fatales in streaming television.
I chatted with Har’el to find out more about the challenges of crafting two female protagonists and weaving their stories together while creating a satisfying murder mystery.
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“I think the show is sort of like a collision course of these two women, a juxtaposition of these two lives. But I really wanted to use this genre that really pulls you in – this whole concept of who done it and what's next. But turn it inwards a little and there's a duality that happens in both of these lives, where you are following a story that is investigative. You're trying to figure out who murdered these women. And at the same time, you're following these women trying to track back in time to discover who killed their innocence, who murdered their right to dream,” Har’el says in a way that makes me understand that death isn’t just a literal part of the story, but a figurative part, too. That’s the element that takes the story to a deeper, psychological place.
Though Har’el is an accomplished film director, Lady in the Lake is her entrée into writing for television. She describes the experience of writing the pilot as, “A fire that came out of me!” But when it came to writing the show’s two protagonists, the book was only a springboard to get her started. There was still one more piece of the puzzle she had to investigate.
Lady in the Lake (2024)
“In the book, the character of Cleo was more of a voice. You very much follow the Maddie story, but you never got acquainted with the world and the life of Cleo. She was more of a dead body that you've got insights into, but you never fully met,” she says.
Har’el began doing research into the death of Shirley Parker, the real woman who inspired the character of Cleo in the book.
“When I read about Shirley Parker and the life she led, it seemed very different from the woman that was presented in the book. I wanted to paint a picture of that life because I was in awe of it and of Baltimore in the 1960s,” she says.
The show itself has an unusual structure: the first four episodes set up the world and main characters, while the last three episodes are the unraveling of the mystery. Har’el adds that the last two episodes, “Are really not in the book.” Sometimes the deeper you go into character, the more story you have to invent for all the elements to coalesce and tie together.
The show is visceral and sensual, with help from gorgeous costumes and perhaps the best soundtrack of any murder mystery ever. Putting all these details down on the page involved a lot of heavy lifting for a first-time writer, but luckily she had help.
Lady in the Lake (2024)
“Later on, I was aided by having a writer's room with these three wonderful black women writers [Nambi E. Kelley, Sheila Wilson, Briana Belser] and my E.P. Boaz Yakin. It was a lot of work making difficult decisions about how to veer from the book and how much license to take,” she says.
Read More: From novel to script: writing an adaptation
Unlike the book that is told from multiple points of view, the show is narrated solely by Cleo – from the grave. In her death, she has a wisdom and poetry she didn’t have time for in life. “I looked to the preacher for deliverance, I looked to the pimp for protection, I looked to the preacher for salvation. In the end, I was on my own,” says Cleo.
Har’el says she’s noticed that people online are responding not only to the poetry of her words but to actress Moses Ingram’s delivery.
“It's so cool now that the show is out, and I'm seeing on Twitter [Now X] that people are quoting Cleo and her voiceover, and calling it bars saying, ‘That it's just good bars,’ or how they have to rewind the scene for the bars,” she says. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “bars,” it’s how some people refer to lyrics in rap music.
Har’el shares this advice for writers tackling an original TV pilot: Make your characters feel as authentic as possible by understanding their flaws.
“Think about the duality of your hero – or characters. Let's call them characters because I don’t like that word hero. But think about the duality and the relationship between your characters and the world that they live in. Feel like you fully understand them, not from a place of knowing their strengths, but actually from understanding their weaknesses. Because I think shadow work is the hardest thing in writing,” she says.
Lady in the Lake (2024)
By “shadow work” she means the focus on the Jungian concept of the shadow, or that dark side that exists in all of us.
“I think that understanding your character's shadow – and your own – is the hardest thing to do when you write — in many ways. If character is destiny, then the shadow is where the drama comes from,” she says.
Lady in the Lake is currently streaming on AppleTV+.