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Lady in the Lake Treads Shallow Waters
Replacing a mystery with a sermon, the TV adaptation smooths over the thematic depths of the novel that inspired it.
Laura Lippman’s immersively imagined and cleverly written 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—understood 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 TV version of Lady in the Lake is so altered, though, that it loses core elements of its source material, from the novel’s interest in tracking its female characters’ discordant, vying relationships with each other and their complex negotiations of when to deflect or encourage male attention for their own benefit, to its depiction of Baltimore as a city of neighborhoods with generations of interwoven, fraught history. And throughout the series, Har’el puts viewers inside a few of Maddie and Cleo’s actual dreams, with the women clutching lambs, wandering under lines of hanging laundry and through floods of aquarium water, and, in a particular cringey scene, dancing in a choreographed routine to a jazzy cover of “Go Down Moses.”
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