If you came to Lady in the Lake just to see some exquisite 1960s era production design and Natalie Portman chewing scenery, you’ll be in for a treat. If you came to find a fresh, new angle on race relations, anti-semitism, sexism, et cetera in the volatile city of Baltimore, you should probably just watch The Wire instead. There’s genuine emotion, intriguing stories, and filmmaking choices to be found within the AppleTV+ limited series, but the streamer already has plenty more captivating offerings that should be watched first.

Portman plays Maddie Schwartz, a comfortable but unhappy Jewish housewife in 1960s Baltimore, who frets over the disappearance of a young Jewish girl named Tessie Durst within the community. Meanwhile, Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), a Black working mother, struggles to make ends meet for her comedian husband (Byron Bowers) and their son. She works at a shady nightclub run by Shell Gordon (Wood Harris – hello, The Wire connections) and Reggie Robinson (Josiah Cross) before she’s murdered and becomes the titular Lady in the Lake.

Showrunner Alma Har’el, who adapts Laura Lippman’s novel of the same name, has a tough needle to thread, careful to not make the show into an exercise in White Savior complexes. This becomes especially difficult though, after Maddie takes it upon herself to investigate Tessie and Cleo’s deaths, going so far as to work for the Baltimore Star. Lady in the Lake then morphs into a kind of procedural as Maddie tracks down the murderer(s), though we know Cleo’s killer from the first episode.

This leaves the show open to explore various socio-political-economic issues, but nothing here is particularly groundbreaking. Thankfully Har’el dabbles heavily in magical realism and dream sequences, creating a number of haunting scenes as Maddie and Cleo brush with their loosening grips on reality. Though it’s hard to understand the need for these moments in the show, unless you want to be reminded of Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning descent into madness, Black Swan. Both Maddie and Cleo have flourishes here and there which make them interesting characters. Maddie has a history of promiscuity, and struggles as she tries to divorce her husband (Brett Gelman), eventually leading to a tryst with a Black police officer (Y’lan Nolan). Cleo is a supportive wife and mother who has designs on becoming a singer at Shell and Reggie’s club, but falls at their mercy to do their illegal bidding.

There’s a brief moment within the show where it wrestles with the prescient subject of the media’s fascination with covering the tragedies of white men and women, and their shunning of Black tragedies. But this quickly goes by the wayside as the plot advances. Similarly, plot points about government experiments which drives one of the murder suspects insane, and a bizarre lottery based on interpretations of dreams, go nowhere. Simply put, if Lady in the Lake is supposed to be a psychological thriller, it’s rarely psychologically invigorating, and it’s not particularly thrilling.

The first two episodes of Lady in the Lake premiere on AppleTV+ on July 19, with subsequent episodes releasing each Friday.