At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the less-well-heeled Jane takes a job, a child asks the series’s core question about its sun-kissed dream town: “Why is it the prettier something is, the more dangerous?” You could see it delving endlessly into this affluent community where the teachers work lectures on sustainable agriculture into a reading of “Charlotte’s Web” and parents treat teachers like servants.
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You could see the fulcrum of this series being Witherspoon as the hard charging, indispensable Madeline. That kind of show could, theoretically, run for years, if not chained to, and defined by, its initial mystery hook.
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(Her sessions with her therapist, a finely calibrated Robin Weigert, are as essential this season as last.)Īfter all, “Big Little Lies” is the sort of series, about people in a specific and well-imagined setting simply living life, that TV still needs more of. Kidman is remarkable, portraying Celeste in a kind of horror-story limbo, keeping Perry’s memory alive for her kids and, in a messy but believable way, for herself. It’s a worldview personified richly, for instance, in the business mogul Renata (Laura Dern), whose bulldozer personality is founded on a deep fear of falling.īut! It’s also possible to imagine a version of the series that continued without her. For now, she seems at odds with the show’s philosophy that we are all the worst, at moments, but that’s not the sum of us. Maybe Kelley (the season’s writer, with a story co-credit for Moriarty) will find layers in Mary Louise. I find little people to be untrustworthy.” “You’re very short,” she says upon meeting Madeline (Reese Witherspoon). In a series that stood out for seeing complications in even its least sympathetic characters, she is a straightforward nightmare: sanctimonious, moralizing, devious and rude to the point that it suggests a social disorder. Mary Louise is the worst and best thing about the early part of the season. She has shown up to “help” Celeste - which is to say, to dispense sunshiny, catty judgment, undermine her at home, perform her grief loudly and drop suspicious questions about her sainted (to her) son’s passing. He is reanimated most directly, and his function as antagonist taken over by, his mother, Mary Louise (Meryl Streep). He is a corpse that will not stay buried. He remains present in flashbacks, in the confused mourning of Celeste’s two sons (and their increasingly aggressive acting-out), in the hold he still has on Celeste and in the guilt and pained memories of the friends, now known as the “Monterey Five,” who are keeping that night’s secret, especially Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz). (Whether what happened was actually a “murder” is legally questionable, since it played out as an accidental killing in self-defense.) The victim, so called, was Perry (Alexander Skarsgard), killed in a group melee with the series’s five central women, including his wife, Celeste (Nicole Kidman), whom he abused, and their neighbor Jane (Shailene Woodley), whom he raped.
Death was the hook for a story about parenting, marriage and the million species of guilt and judgment visited upon mothers in luminous, money-drenched Monterey, Calif.
Kelley used a murder investigation as a delivery device for an empathetic, class-conscious and acidly funny drama. In that first, seemingly self-contained season, based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, the creator David E. “Big Little Lies” continues to offer the sharp, dark-comedic observations that made the first season one of the great thrills of 2017. Here’s the good news: It worked a lot better than I feared. The first season seemed to finish as definitively as the death it ended on, and I was doubtful the show could be shocked back to life. The latest seemingly concluded series to un-conclude itself is HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” arriving this Sunday. To watch TV these days can be like going to a movie, sitting through the credits and finding, not a surprise post-credits scene, but an entire additional film.
“Leave ’em wanting more” is not a concept familiar to television’s current business model. “The End of the _ing World,” apparently, was just the beginning. “13 Reasons Why” found reason to slog on. “The Handmaid’s Tale” moved beyond Margaret Atwood’s novel, first audaciously, then bludgeoningly, now tiringly.
“Barry” and “Killing Eve” continued what might have been stunning limited series with entertaining second seasons that nonetheless labored to spin out their premises. We are living in a golden age of TV series that build to big finishes and then just … stick around.