Alma Har’el is a consummate storyteller. The Israeli-born director, co-writer and showrunner of Lady in the Lake, an adaptation of Laura Lippman’s best-selling 2019 novel of the same name, has created a fascinating thriller that explores themes of race and gender.

The series, now on Apple TV+, is set in segregated 1960’s Baltimore and tells the story of Jewish mother, housewife and budding journalist Maddie Schwartz, played by Academy Award-winner Natalie Portman in her first television role. Maddie becomes obsessed with solving two unrelated murders: the deaths of an 11-year-old Jewish girl, Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle) and 33-year-old Cleo Johnson (the riveting, Emmy-nominated Moses Ingram), a struggling Black mom who worked three jobs to support her children.

When we first meet Maddie, she is unhappy and unfulfilled in her marriage to her chauvinistic lawyer husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), and as a mother to their son, Seth (Noah Jupe). When she discovers Tessie’s body, it inspires her to pursue a career in journalism and eventually leave her family. Maddie’s Jewish identity permeates the series, with scenes set in a kosher butcher shop, a synagogue and at a Jewish funeral. Nevertheless, she struggles with her own identity and the societal expectations placed upon her as a Jewish woman living in the 1960’s.

Lippman, a former journalist for The Baltimore Sun, was inspired to write the book after hearing about two real-life, unrelated murders in the city in the same year. On June 2, 1969, an electrical crew sent to repair faulty lights in the fountain in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park Lake discovered the body of 35-year-old Shirley Parker, a Black woman who had disappeared five weeks earlier. On September 29 of that year, Esther Lebowitz, an 11-year-old Jewish girl, disappeared after visiting a local tropical fish store. Her body was found a few days later. The press coverage of the two deaths was starkly different and revealed troubling racial dynamics in Baltimore at that time.

Har’el was intrigued by Lippman’s multilayered story and brought it to streaming life as a subversive noir thriller complete with dance numbers and dream sequences. At the same time, it is also a deep psychological character drama centered on the stories of two women, Maddie and Cleo. Their backgrounds are gradually revealed in flashbacks as the series progresses.

The 49-year-old director, who grew up in Tel Aviv and relocated to the United States almost 20 years ago, explained in the production notes that she has always used compelling characters in her stories, “to tell them”—the stories—”from the inside out.” Har’el also expressed how privileged she feels to work with Portman, who has a personal connection to her character: Portman’s grandmother lived in Baltimore and would have been Maddie’s age in the 1960s.

For Har’el, the opportunity to film a story set in that era was impossible to resist—a time, she explained, that “changed America forever, in terms of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement and the music that was playing from every radio.”

Amid this rich political and cultural backdrop, viewers will be captivated by how the series gradually reveals the secrets and insecurities of these two women.

“The truth is that most of us don’t fully understand ourselves,” Har’el noted. “That mystery is what keeps us alive, constantly striving to figure ourselves out while navigating life’s challenges. I wanted to use the thriller and mystery genre to explore the existential facets of these characters that remain a mystery even to them.”

Susan L. Hornik is a veteran entertainment and lifestyle journalist.