With deserved hype and promotional preamble to pave the way, Big Little Lies — featuring the powerhouse triumvirate of Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley — hit the HBO ground running with last Sunday’s teasingly enticing opening episode. As an early field report, at least for this viewer, the seven-episode “limited series” has already earned that golden ticket in the serialization game: The hook is in, and the game is on.
Based on the book by Liane Moriarty, the show is an artfully conjured melodramatic maze on the general theme of elementary-school dynamics in Monterey, teeming with backbiting and the heightened ambition of contemporary goal-lusty and college-track-minded parenting, with presumably innocent young children caught in the cross fire. Catty parents, ostracized children, and paranoid suspicions abound, and as more than one parent exclaims when recounting the dirty deeds and sentiments leading up to the story’s mystery catastrophe, “The battle lines were drawn …” This playground-as-battleground scenario manages to be both true to life and a theatrical conceit, with at least slightly guilty-pleasurable entertainment values in the margins.
To twist a phrase, the new show follows a “big/little”-screen dichotomy (if it even qualifies as a dichotomy anymore) as yet another entry in the continuing and evolving saga of cinematic values and artists moving fluidly from one medium to the other. Witherspoon, Kidman, and Woodley (of The Divergent sci-fi survivalist series and Snowden fame) are most familiar to us from our trips to the “real” movieplex, and Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée comes to the television landscape with the imprimatur and cinematic sensibilities of having directed Dallas Buyer’s Club and Wild (a showpiece for Witherspoon).