‘The Lake’ Season 2 Review: Lake Supremacy
Amazon's quippy comedy "The Lake" continues to queer the Great White North with its cast of quirky Canucks in cottage country.
A summer breezy, single-camera sitcom set amongst the wacky community of cottage owners on a bucolic lake in Ontario, Amazon’s aptly named The Lake (★★★★☆) is about as far as you could get from The White Lotus.
Still, it’s not hard to imagine a Jennifer Coolidge character bobbing around this comedy’s assortment of similarly privileged, mostly white, comically self-centered vacationers who don’t take themselves too seriously but will wage all-out war to ensure their cottage season goes according to plan.
Season one of the show, created by Julian Doucet, pitted step-siblings Justin (Orphan Black‘s Jordan Gavaris) and Maisy-May (Julia Stiles) against one another over possession of their deceased father’s lake cottage. Though Justin, who’s gay, was dad’s biological son, the old guy apparently felt closer to stepdaughter Maisy-May, who, as of last year, still lorded over the lake’s owners’ association with a smug smile and firm hand.
Written as an uber-bitch big sister, Maisy-May manages, in Stiles’ sardonic turn, to come off as utterly ruthless, yet still loving and sentimental, especially towards ex-hockey pro hubby Victor (Terry Chen), and their two kids.
Her sharp edges are softened largely by the heartwarming rapport she shares with the youngest, Opal (Declan Whaley, great in the role), a genderqueer tween whose innate fabulousness Maisy-May fully supports.
The writers contrast the wholesome well of encouragement extended to Opal with Justin’s sense of resentment towards his family for not as warmly accepting him.
Maisy-May would contend that the family’s issue with Justin is that he has always put himself first. And that’s his journey on the show, played with appealing comic flair by Gavaris, to overcome his tendency to center himself in the universe.
He learned that lesson somewhat in season one spending his first summer getting to know — and hatching shenanigans with — Billie (Madison Shamoun), the biracial teenage daughter he gave up for adoption when he was still a teenager. He also fell in love with a handsome local handyman (and roadkill artiste), Riley (Travis Nelson), their pairing turning out to be the lake’s hottest gossip of the season.
Their romance heats up, and might flame out, in season two, which finds Justin and Billie back at the lake for the summer, and embroiled not only in romantic entanglements but a flaming-hot mystery.
Somebody burns down the lake boathouse, the community’s sacrosanct center of activities and operations, and all evidence of the crime appears to point to Justin.
So he hunts down clues to clear his name, while also working to recover from a very public misstep in his sexy romance with Riley. Billie also stumbles through the summer, as she explores her bisexuality, and, taking too much after Justin, finds herself the center of a love triangle between Forrest (Jhaleil Swaby) and Ivy (Max Amani), volunteer tree-planters who just happen to be brother and sister.
Given much more to do in season two, Shamoun acquits herself well as the show’s co-lead. Though not as natural a comedian as Gavaris, or many of the quirky supporting and background players, Shamoun supplies the heart in this daddy-daughter dance. Much like the relationship between Maisy-May and Opal, it’s the beautifully earned rapport between Justin and Billie that most makes rooting for Justin feel worthwhile.
Whether or not he ends up holding the keys to the cabin registers as a minor detail next to the major question of whether he and Billie — and Riley, perhaps — can bond like family. Their family extends to Maisy-May and her crew, along with her flighty mother Mimsy, a season two addition played by Lauren Holly, breezing in to further complicate the siblings’ bitter battle over lake supremacy.
All threads this season converge in a daffy, Agatha Christie-spoofing finale, Death on Denial, that offers Justin as Poirot sizing up the suspects. Well-directed by Paul Fox, the episode might rely too heavily on some of those minor characters to shore up the season’s big mystery, but the comedy kills, particularly in scenes that bring together the whole eclectic cast for a sweet story that guides each of the show’s lead characters safely home to harbor.
The Lake seasons 1 and 2 are available for streaming on Prime Video. Visit www.amazon.com.
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