It's the under-the-radar TV drama you didn't know you wanted until right now
Look - I don’t get it. Apple TV+ has an above-average number of good to great TV shows. They’re kinda becoming the new HBO. I’m certainly not the first to suggest that.
But do you want to know what the difference is between Apple TV+ and HBO? Both have shows are lavishly produced, often have big name actors in them, and are more often than not deeper, more textured dramas than you find elsewhere. But, if there is a new HBO show coming out, you generally know about it in advance. With Apple TV+ there are crickets.
And that is weird because Apple is great at marketing. Behind the scenes, Apple also does a great job in terms of supplying critics with screener access that has long lead times and an easy-to-use platform. It’s a great experience. So, what is the disconnect? Embargoes.
Almost every Apple TV+ show has a review embargo that breaks the same day as the show is released. And in today’s world of too many distractions coupled with there being too many shows to keep track of, it means that often viewers only learn a show exists as the first episode is available to screen. Good for the viewer, but bad for buzz.
Case in point: How many of you knew that there is a new Natalie Portman limited series available for you to press play on right now at Apple TV+? Did you know that it co-stars Moses Ingram from The Queens Gambit?
And did you know that the show is really f**king good?
The Lady in The Lake is about an American-Jewish housewife (played by Natalie Portman) in 1966 who is frustrated in her life, separates from her American-Jewish husband, and gets obsessed with helping find a young American-Jewish girl who has gone missing. This stirs in her a passion for truth-seeking and a job in journalism.
Why did I mention that all of these people are American-Jewish in my blurb? It’s because this is the most American-Jewish show I’ve seen on TV in some time. And considering the current political climate, I think I suddenly understand why this show might be a bit of a hard sell right now.
Meanwhile, the Moses Ingram character is a hustler working multiple jobs including a job at a nightclub run by local gangsters (who have played a role in the disappearance of that girl). She is trying to elevate her life, along with the lives of her kids. Like Portman’s character, she too has a man she leaves in the first episode.
We know that by the end of the limited series, her character will be killed as the series is narrated by her from the beyond. This is the one aspect of the show that feels tired and trite.
A lot of the TV and movies we watch nowadays are built around themes of female power (those who have it and those who don’t) and we are all supposed to blindly accept them all, even if too many of these shows are all perhaps too surface and offensively simple in execution. This show is certainly not that - showrunner/creator/director Alma Har’el gives each of the women in the series a very strong interiority and motivation (both the show’s leads and supporting characters like Mickey Madison’s Judith Weinstein - a young woman desperate to find her passport to adulthood and sees Portman’s Maddie Schwartz as her saviour). These are women in situations we have seen on screen many times before, but here they are realised with such authenticity that we cheer and commiserate with them from a position of humanity and not political obligation.
Sometimes when feeling so enthusiastic, I feel the need to check myself. Was I just having the sort of day where a show like this completely hit me where I personally needed it to? At moments like that I check in with my TV critic spirit animal Lucy Mangan at The Guardian.
Good news - she loved it too:
Lady in the Lake spends the first two episodes largely world- and character-building. It’s meticulous and valuable, but it is also a slight relief when the action starts up in the third episode and the story proper begins – not least because Portman (whom I generally find a fairly uninteresting proposition as an actor) begins to shine and to hold her own against the extraordinary Ingram. Maddie inveigles her way into the killer’s life and that of his mother and uses the relationship and the information gained to establish her reporter bona fides. When – spoiler alert! – the body of Cleo is discovered in the fountain of a local park, Maddie repeats the trick and parlays it into the beginning of a successful career.
Lady in the Lake becomes many things beyond an intricate murder-mystery. It is a snapshot of civil rights-era Baltimore, a portrait of racial prejudice, sexual oppression and the intersection of both, and – via Maddie’s ruthlessness and her frequent blindness to her neighbours’ lives and experiences – an examination of how oppression does not necessarily inoculate you against becoming the oppressor. The drama asks what true liberation for all might look like, and if it can ever be accomplished for one without cost to another.
Other TV tidbits to consider this weekend:
Those About To Die is a sword and sandals show from Roland Emerich (Independence Day) and starring Anthony Hopkins. Most reviews have not been kind.
BBC One’s The Jetty is getting some very positive commentary from the UK. Again, looking to my beloved Lucy Mangan, she gave the show 4/5 stars and compared it to Happy Valley.
Kite Man: Hell Yeah!! is a spin-off from Max’s DC animated comedy Harley Quinn. Your mileage will vary.
What is Betty La Fea: The Story Continues and why does that name seem a bit familiar? It’s a series sequel to the tele-novella that inspired US dramedy Ugly Betty.