Shadow Play

Characters are reduced to their circumstances in this crime-novel adaptation.

THERE’S A DIFFERENCE between a story that’s narratively big versus thematically big. Laura Lippman’s immersively imagined and cleverly written novel Lady in the Lake—about a pair of murders in 1960s Baltimore, the woman who finds herself unexpectedly connected to both, and how she uses them to further her own ambitions— understands the distinction between a story that lets its characters’ lives unfurl into messy, unpleasant places and one that binds them too tightly to forces beyond their control. The new adaptation on Apple TV+, simultaneously overstuffed and oversimplified, does not. After stripping Lippman’s story of its vivid nuance, it overloads what’s left with systemic discrimination as the primary explanation for its characters’ motivations and setbacks, then drowns in the ensuing wave of sanctimony.

Alma Har’el’s miniseries re-creates, with varying degrees of fidelity, three pivotal plot points from Lippman’s 2019 novel. Jewish housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz, after deciding to leave her husband, discovers the body of an 11-year-old girl named Tessie, whose leagues. While working on the newspaper’s helpline column, she aids in the discovery of another corpse, that of a missing Black woman named Cleo Johnson. Maddie wants to find out what happened to Cleo, and whenever a man tells her to stop—like her editors, who don’t care about covering the death, or the Black police officer she’s secretly sleeping with, who worries people will wonder where she’s getting her intel—it only makes her work that much harder.