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So often, in crime dramas, the victim is silent. Instead, the show focuses on the killer, piecing together the puzzle of why and how they did what they did. Not so in the new Apple TV drama, Lady in the Lake, which is narrated by Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) – the dead woman herself. Johnson is directly addressing Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), the writer and amateur investigator looking into her death.
Set in the 1960s, it’s a drama about female agency, the ties of family and community and the glittering temptations of Baltimore’s underbelly. The mood of the time – anxious and fractured – is conjured through an evocative jazz and soul soundtrack. And civil rights tensions course through the show. Morgenstern is a bored, wealthy Jewish housewife. Johnson is an African American mother with several jobs and a work-shy husband. The women’s unequal powers and privileges shape the drama, and their perceptions of one another.
