Apple TV+’s newest TV show serves up a healthy dollop of noir alongside its story of women fighting the patriarchy.
It is 1966, and, as James Brown would famously sing at the opening of that year, it’s a man’s man’s man’s world. Nobody feels that more than the women living in it.
We find Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), a Jewish housewife living in Baltimore who’s yearning for something more than life as a wife and mother; when her husband, Milton, berates her for putting the brisket in the wrong dish, he’s completely dumbstruck when she walks out on him.
Maddie wants to become an investigative journalist, and when the case of a missing young girl, Tessie Fine, comes to her attention, Maddie is hooked. As she begins investigating, we see the parallel life of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), who is fighting her own battles, which include racism and alcoholism as well as struggling to provide for her family.
“I know who I am, I know who I want to be, and she ain’t broke,” she says, straddling jobs posing in department store windows and as a cocktail waitress while caring for her two sons.
Over the course of the early episodes, we duly see Maddie return to her passion for investigative journalism at a Baltimore paper, embarking on a liaison with a black police officer (interracial marriage was still illegal at this point), while living in a small flat she finds through a pawnbroker – and of course trying to find Tessie.
The show is based on Laura Lippman’s book, which is packed with meticulous research: Lippman is a Baltimore resident, worked as a newspaper journalist, and is immersed in that world (her father was also a reporter, her husband, David Simon, was a reporter before turning to TV and creating The Wire).
It doesn’t always translate comfortably to the screen though, and the adaptation feels abridged, even confused, with the different narrators and supporting characters racing by.
It is undoubtedly stylishly shot. In Israeli director Alma Har’el’s hands, the adaptation is gritty, with a noirish energy that feels tightly-strung, the lives of the two women weaving together as Maddie becomes fixated on finding the truth of the murder.
One problem was how long it took to set the action up however beautifully shot the show is, and however meticulous the acting. Yes, the world rendered is moody, heavy, dripping with that Things Are Going To Happen energy – but the viewer can’t help but yearn for them to happen more quickly.
It’s worth sticking with it, though – once it really got going it really pulls the viewer in; you really want to find out the fate of these women.
In the end, it is not the plot that dazzles in this version but rather the portrayal of the oppressive weight these lives are lived under, that man’s man’s man’s world riddled with endless challenges for the women living in it.
