Adapting ‘Lady in the Lake’ for TV meant centering the women at the core of the story

The seeds of “Lady in the Lake” were planted in 1969 with the disappearances and deaths of an 11-year-old Jewish girl and a 33-year-old Black woman in Baltimore. These crimes inspired Laura Lippman to write her 2019 novel, in which multiple narrators tell the stories of aspiring newspaper reporter Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish woman trying to establish herself as a journalist as she breaks away from her traditionalist family; and Cleo Sherwood, a Black waitress who gets on the wrong side of her criminal employers.

Now “Lady in the Lake” has been adapted into a seven-episode limited series, created by Alma Har’el and premiering Friday on Apple TV+. The story, about women pushing against hard glass ceilings, a city on the brink, and the different ways that different people look for freedom, has undergone significant changes on the path from the streets of Baltimore to the pages of a bestseller and now to the screen. In separate interviews, Lippman, Har’el and members of the cast, including stars Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, shared their thoughts about bringing “Lady” to life.

The novelist

Lippman is a Baltimore native and former reporter at the Baltimore Sun. As a child, she read about Esther Lebowitz, an 11-year-old girl who in 1969 went missing and was later found dead. But it wasn’t until Lippman went to work at the Sun that she learned of Shirley Parker, the Black woman who received almost no coverage in the city’s white, mainstream press when her decomposed body was found in a lake fountain soon thereafter.

“I grew up reading the newspaper, but I had to go work at the newspaper and take the rewrite guys’ tour of Baltimore to find out about the Lady in the Lake,” she said in an interview from her Baltimore home. “I was very much interested in the idea that a little girl died and everybody knew, and a Black woman died, and we’ve never even had an official cause of death. They’ve never even been able to rule it a homicide, and at this point, there’s not going to be any determination made in that death.”

This discrepancy fascinated Lippman. But she didn’t want to just write a novel about these two deaths. When she writes fiction, she doesn’t do deep research into specific cases.

“I don’t reach out to the real-life families who might have connections to these cases because I don’t want to inflict pain,” Lippman said. “I’m thinking about this all the time. There have been some crime podcasts that do this that I have really had trouble with.”

Instead, she set out to write a novel with a very specific theme: “I decided to go really meta and write a story about a white woman who exploits Black pain for her own gain.”

Enter Maddie, played in the series by Portman — in her first recurring TV role — and Cleo, played by Ingram (“The Queen’s Gambit”), whose surname is Johnson in the adaptation. The disappearance of the little girl sends Maddie into an existential tailspin. She leaves her husband, moves into a predominantly Black neighborhood and rekindles an old passion for journalism. She grows increasingly obsessed with the missing girl, and then with Cleo, who chides Maddie, perhaps from the grave, for missing the big picture.

“Lady in the Lake” plays differently on the screen than on the page — Maddie is a little more redeemable in the series than in the novel — and the myriad narrative voices in the book have given way to a dialogue of sorts between Maddie and Cleo.

Lippman, who calls the series “terrific,” has no problem with such changes. The author, who was married to David Simon, creator of the quintessential Baltimore series “The Wire,” said she knows a lot about how TV is made but that she doesn’t write for the screen.

“I don’t think of it as my story anymore,” Lippman said. “I didn’t from the moment I sold it. I come to adaptation as a novelist.”

The creator

Har’el, who was born and raised in Israel but is now a longtime Los Angeles resident, was struck by how the story handled Maddie’s Jewish identity when the project was first brought to her by producers Nathan Ross and the late Jean-Marc Vallée.

“The idea of Jewishness creates an opportunity to explore persecution, racism, and both oppression and being an oppressor,” she said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home. “It also lets you look at assimilation, or having the possibility to even assimilate.”

These ideas swirl around Maddie, whose family eats kosher and observes the high holidays, and who rebels against her culture’s expectations of her as a wife and mother.

But the Black characters in “Lady in the Lake” intrigued her as well, particularly the different ways they represent the idea of freedom. Har’el’s romantic partner, comedian Byron Bowers, inspired her to create a husband for Cleo, Slappy “Dark” Johnson, whom he plays in the series. Slappy is a Richard Pryor-like comic testing creative boundaries in the mid-‘60s (both novel and series take place in 1966) and exploring topics that resonate within the Black community. Bowers was also a consulting producer on the series, and several of the series’ writers are Black.

“Everybody in the series is fighting their own war inside, and finding freedom outside of what society says, which is something I try to do in real life,” Bowers said in a separate interview. “This is a world of Black people I didn’t even know. I came up in the crack epidemic. But this is when families still were families and Black people had hope before heroin and the Vietnam War.”

Where Lippman’s novel incorporates multiple narrators, some more reliable than others, Har’el immediately zoomed in on the voices of Cleo and Maddie, two women desperately trying to break free of the strictures created by a very patriarchal society. Maddie can’t even sell her own car without her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s signature; Cleo lives largely under the thumb of her gangster/club owner boss, played by Wood Harris, who combines Black Power rhetoric with a ruthless command of the city’s numbers racket.

Har’el, who was the lead writer and also directed all seven episodes of the series, sees the characters as part of the same push-pull duality that fuels the entire story.

“There’s a Jungian underbelly going on in the show that is trying to seduce you to maybe see beyond the politics of it all and into human experience,” she said. “It turns that experience into something that, hopefully, the characters get to touch.”

But without her stars, she says, the ideas mean little.

“The credit goes to the actors,” she says. “They come to that emotional place with authenticity, and it’s pretty magical to see them do that.”

The stars

Portman was attached to the project from the beginning, as a star and executive producer. At one point Lupita N’yongo was slated to play Cleo, but the character ultimately wasn’t cast until shooting had commenced; “Nobody could agree,” Har’el says. “But when Moses came in, it was so clear. Everybody saw it right away.”

Ingram and Portman rarely appear on screen together, but they’re linked from the moment they see each other in the first episode. In the opening scenes, blood from the lamb that Maddie has purchased for her family’s dinner has spilled onto her dress, and she eyes the outfit that Cleo is modeling in the window of a department store. For Portman, this moment speaks volumes.

“In that initial scene of them together, where she’s looking at Cleo in the dress, she’s really just looking at the dress,” Portman said in a video interview alongside Ingram. “It’s kind of symbolic of how she treats Cleo. She’s using her as a vehicle for her own needs and to further her own ambition.”

And yet, the series takes pains to connect them, thematically and visually, in the editing process, through crosscutting that links them throughout different periods of their lives.

“I think they’re living in a very similar world that’s affecting them both in similar ways,” Ingram said. “Being women, being mothers, taking care of the husband and the children and also trying to figure out what they might want for themselves, let alone how to get it — those are all things they share.”

In the series, Maddie is a bit softer than she is in the novel, a little less single-minded in the way she uses Cleo’s story to establish a journalism career. But she’s still deeply flawed and somewhat blind to the lives she writes about. (Lippman: “I joke that if you want to be a human-interest writer, it helps to have some interest in humans”).

For Portman, the fact that Maddie is no angel made the role more interesting, and more human.

“It speaks to the tragedy of the fact that, even if you’re oppressed, you can still be an oppressor,” she says. “That’s something that we have to be very conscious of, because I think the opposite story is usually told: ‘Oh, if someone did something to you, you don’t do it to someone else.’ And that’s just unfortunately not very true.”

For Lippman, a somewhat kinder, gentler Maddie speaks to the different roads taken in a different medium. And she’s quite happy with the results.

“Natalie Portman’s Maddie is much bigger, much more layered and complicated than my Maddie,” she said. “How can I not love that? There’s a big difference between asking readers to come along with a not particularly likable character and asking people to watch that character in a limited series, especially if it’s a female. I really respect the choices made in this adaptation, because they’re thoughtful.”