A super Jewish show starring Natalie Portman is almost here!

"Lady in the Lake" from Israeli director Alma Ha'rel looks SO promising.

This month, a new TV show is premiering starring Natalie Portman as a divorced 1960s Jewish housewife. Just that line should be enough to fill any Jewish TV buff with irrepressible excitement, but it’s actually another Jewish woman that has me even more excited about “Lady in the Lake,” coming to Apple TV+ on July 19. 

No, not Mikey Madison, star of “Better Things,” though yes, I’m thrilled to have her on my TV screen too, but Alma Har’el, the director of the show that tells the story of Maddie Schwartz (Portman), a mother trying to reinvent herself as an investigative journalist, and whose imagination is captured by the murder of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).

via Apple TV+

Like Portman, this is Har’el’s first TV show, and thanks to Portman, it’s also her first time directing in Hebrew, even though the director, known for her fantastic big red curls, is originally from Israel and started her career as a VJ for the Israeli group Balkan Beat Box. Har’el didn’t go to school for film, and it was VJ-ing that helped the now award-winning director sharpen her style and skills — one where she oscillates between dreams and reality, a phantasmagorical, musical visual style that you can see in the gorgeous, entrancing music videos she made for bands like Beirut and Sigur Rós, in her 2019 film “Honey Boy,” and that’s clearly apparent in the first trailer for “Lady in the Lake.” 

The trailer is all about dreams; we see a copy of a “Dream Book,” the song “The Impossible Dream” plays in the background, and it’s hard to say which scenes are dreams and which are reality — fish in the bathtub, glittery dark nightclubs, gigantic parade floats falling, Maddie looking at Cleo in a window in an echoing yellow dress.

In fact the show is all about women’s dreams: Cleo’s dream of financial security and a better life, for her and her children; Maddie’s dream of being a writer and her own woman; and the way dreams intersect with their identities, as a Black woman for Cleo, as a Jewish woman for Maddie. Women’s dreams are also very much Har’el’s business — in 2016, she started the initiative “Free the Bid,” calling on ad agencies to make sure that one of three bidders on their projects was a woman. 

So really, I’m looking forward to this show because it feels like the culmination of everything that Alma Har’el has ever worked on, with so many parts of her identity on screen — her feminism, and yes, her Jewishness. The trailer previews two harrowing Jewish moments: a Jewish funeral and one with Maddie wearing a yellow Jewish star patch, backing away from a group of women dressed in blue. And knowing the source material, which is the richly written book of the same name by Laura Lippman, there’s a lot more Jewishness to look forward too, but also, a lot about what it means to be Black in 1960s Baltimore. There’s also more Moses Ingram to look forward to, who we all fell in love with in “The Queen’s Gambit,” and who absolutely owns the screen in the short two-minute trailer.

Will you be watching “Lady in the Lake?”