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Lady in the Lake review – Natalie Portman’s TV debut is absolutely impeccable | Television

This fearless, 60s-set thriller is astonishingly written and acted. It’s so sumptuous that its brilliance threatens to overwhelm you

This is a seven-part adaptation of the 2019 bestseller of the same name by Laura Lippman, an exceptional thriller writer, that stars Natalie Portman in her first small-screen role and marks visionary director Alma Har’el’s first time as a showrunner. She has one foot in Baltimore’s criminal community (as the bookkeeper for Shell Gordon, who runs the city’s illegal gambling operation, and a waitress at one of his clubs) and the other in the above-board world, working as a model in a department store and volunteering for Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson), the state’s first Black female senator. It uses dream sequences, musical interludes, flashbacks and assorted other devices that in lesser hands can be – and frequently are – mere irritants to flesh out its characters and questions more fully.

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