‘Lady in the Lake’ Series to Debut July 19 on Apple TV+

May 17, 2024 JMORE Staff

In the 1960s-era crime drama, Natalie Portman plays a frustrated Pikesville housewife who becomes an investigative journalist to pursue an unsolved homicide case. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images, via JTA)

Apple TV+ recently announced that the Baltimore-themed series “Lady in the Lake” will debut on Friday, July 19.

The original, seven-part series — based on the best-selling 2019 novel of the same name by Baltimore author Laura Lippman — stars Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman and was filmed in Pikesville and other parts of Baltimore.

The first two episodes will be available immediately on Apple TV+. One episode will premiere subsequently each Friday. The finale will air on Aug. 23.

The series was created, produced, written and directed by Israeli-American filmmaker Alma Har’el. Portman was an executive producer on the series.

Lippman, 65, who grew up in Columbia, based her novel on a pair of homicides that took place in Baltimore in 1969: the abduction and murder of 11-year-old Bais Yaakov School for Girls student Esther Lebowitz and 33-year-old Shirley Lee Wigeon Parker, a Black woman whose lifeless body was in the fountain of Druid Hill Park Reservoir.

The official Apple TV+ synopsis of “Lady in the Lake” states, “When the disappearance of a young girl grips the city of Baltimore on Thanksgiving 1966, the lives of two women converge on a fatal collision course. Maddie Schwartz (Portman), a Jewish housewife seeking to shed a secret past and reinvent herself as an investigative journalist, and Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram), a mother navigating the political underbelly of Black Baltimore while struggling to provide for her family. …

“‘Lady in the Lake’ emerges as a feverish noir thriller and an unexpected tale of the price women pay for their dreams.”

“Lady in the Lake” is the first TV starring role for Portman, 42, who was born in Jerusalem and attended the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville.

“The story itself was really compelling to me because of two primary things: One is that my grandmother was from Baltimore and about the same age as Maddie during that time period,” Portman said in a recent interview with L’Officiel USA magazine. “So there was a real imagination of what it was like to be a woman at that time in that kind of city. And also the story of Jewish assimilation is interesting to me, and the question of what it’s like when oppressed people can become oppressors.”

In addition to Portman and Ingram, “Lady in the Lake” stars Y’lan Noel, Brett Gelman, Byron Bowers, Noah Jupe, Josiah Cross, Mikey Madison and Pruitt Taylor Vince.

Academy Award-winner Lupita Nyong’o was originally slated to portray Cleo Sherwood but left the production in April of 2022 and was replaced by the Emmy Award-nominated Ingram. Also, production on “Lady in the Lake” was briefly halted in August of 2022 due to an alleged extortion attempt by someone described as a downtown “street vendor.”