TV Review - Little Fires Everywhere

Reese Witherspoon has become an incredible and powerful, TV producer. Within the span of less than a year, about nine months, she has produced and starred in three, TV shows. The first was the second season of HBO's Big Little Lies in June 2019. Then, there was Apple TV's The Morning Show in November. Finally, we have this series on Hulu. She also produced Apple TV's Truth Be Told back in December but wasn't a featured actress in it. However, all of Witherspoon's shows are adaptations of books. In terms of structure and themes, this series feels like a redux of Big Little Lies. There are various similarities between the two that one understands why Witherspoon would be attracted to each of the material. There are differences in the plot points that distinguish and can keep you engaged in this series. However, it did get to a place where one might think they were watching a lesser version of the same thing, not even separated by a year. If Big Little Lies and this series were movies, I'd accuse them of almost being twin films. They even share a word in both their titles.

Big Little Lies was based on a 2014 novel by Liane Moriarty. The book was adapted by David E. Kelley. He wrote the entire first season. Moriarty though was instrumental in the writing of the second season or at least she contributed. This series is based on the 2017 novel by Celeste Ng. Unlike Big Little Lies, this series didin't have one writer as the singular voice driving this thing. This series had a group of eight writers, penning each episode. All the writers were women, which is a significant thing. Liz Tigelaar (Life Unexpected and Brothers & Sisters) did develop the show and was the show-runner.

Oscar-winner Witherspoon (Wild and Walk the Line) stars as Elena Richardson, a woman, probably in her early 40's who lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a small city that is practically a suburb of Cleveland. She lives in a rather, large house that looks like a mini-mansion in a seemingly affluent neighborhood. She works as a journalist at the top newspaper in the area. The series is set in 1997, so the fact that she works at a newspaper means more financially than it might in 2020. Even if it wasn't, she's married to a man who is wealthy or who makes enough to afford that upper-class lifestyle. Elena isn't elitist though. She's very liberal, but she does in many ways live in a bubble. She has four children and her bubble often times makes her parent in a way that might be stifling to her kids.

Much like Big Little Lies, we're introduced to Witherspoon's character by way of a crime that occurs. The series then goes backward in time and depicts the events leading up to that crime, exploring the various characters, as we try to piece together who is the guilty culprit and why they did the crime. Instead of a murder, which was the kickoff to Big Little Lies, the inciting incident here is an act of arson. Elena's aforementioned, mansion-like home is set on fire and it is in fact engulfed in a huge conflagration that destroys the entire thing. The question becomes who set the house ablaze and what was their motive.

Emmy-nominee Kerry Washington (Confirmation and Scandal) also stars as Mia Warren, a single mother and artist who mostly lives on the road, taking her now teenage daughter from one town to the next. She's been living a rather gypsy lifestyle, wandering from place-to-place. She's moved her daughter to Shaker Heights and she rents an apartment in a nice home, but on the poorer side of town from where Elena lives. It just so happens that her landlord is Elena.

The series doesn't depict any of the police investigation of the crime post facto like Big Little Lies, but, any savvy viewer has a police investigation occurring in their head and Mia is an obvious suspect that the series establishes immediately. Mia meets Elena four months before the fire and her antagonism toward Elena becomes apparent very early. A lot of it feels like racial or racially charged microaggressions. It's also an issue of wealth and privilege and how white people who have it often consciously or not use it to exploit people who don't, people who are usually black or some ethnic minority.

Lexi Underwood co-stars as Pearl Warren, the teenage daughter of Mia. Having lived the life that she has with her mother has certainly had an effect on her. She's more shy and insecure, humble of course. There's also a lot about her family that she doesn't know that her mother hasn't told her. Her mother instilled in her not to be materialistic and have a spartan existence. This is in contrast to the children of Elena who have a relatively luxurious and consumerist life. When Mia meets Elena's children, she's intrigued, not because she wants to be materialistic. It's just that Elena's children want more out of life, whereas Mia has been raised simply to be happy or appreciative of what one has, which is often the barest of things that she needs, a very minimalist way.

As mentioned, she stands in contrast to the way that Elena's children live. Mia goes to school with Elena's children and befriends them. She starts hanging out with Elena's children at the mansion-like home, much to the chagrin of Mia. Mia thinks that the values and way of living at Elena's house will rub off or start to adversely affect Mia. The way that all of the children here are treated are different from how the children were treated in Big Little Lies, which makes sense because the children in Big Little Lies were younger. However, I think I prefer the way Big Little Lies did it. The reason is because a lot of the things that happen with Elena's children is melodramatic, soap opera stuff that's just more obvious and frustrating with the exception of one.

Megan Stott plays Izzy Richardson, the youngest child to Elena. She's the daughter with whom Elena has the most trouble. A lot of it stems from the fact that Izzy is gay. She's a lesbian and is in the closet about it. Izzy doesn't want to come out of the closet because Elena won't accept other choices she makes like what kind of clothes she wants to wear or how she wants to style her hair. Elena tries to get Izzy to dress and behave more like a stereotypical girl. Elena doesn't appreciate that Izzy is often gender-nonconforming. It's not that Izzy dresses like a boy. She just doesn't like to wear dresses and other stereotypical things. This causes Izzy to get frustrated and rebel against her mother.

Through Izzy, we get a kind of homophobia that wasn't as overt or as hostile as what would happen to Matthew Shepard in 1998, but it's still an insidious form of homophobia that probably existed in many households. Many children like Izzy were never beaten or physically harmed, but they were denied the opportunity to be themselves, which is a form of abuse. This series does a great job of exploring and exposing that insidiousness. It also puts Izzy toward the top of the list of potential suspects.

What drives everything toward a collision course where everybody is upset with everybody else but mostly being upset at Elena is a custody battle. It's a custody battle that's akin to the one in Losing Isaiah (1995). If you watched the second season of Big Little Lies, then there's another point of comparison because that second season also hinges on a custody battle. It was great to see Witherspoon again in the back of a court room doing some great, wordless acting. Ironically, Joshua Jackson (The Affair and Dawson's Creek) plays Elena's husband, Bill, and is the lawyer in those court scenes. It's ironic because it was only a year ago that he played a lawyer in When They See Us (2019). It was a role in which he excelled in that Netflix series and it's a role in which he excels here.

Finally, it's clear by the final episode of this series that not only is it about motherhood, but it's also about art and the artistic process. As mentioned, Mia is an artist, but Izzy is also an artist. We also see at various points other artists appear and have significant roles. Art and motherhood are perhaps not that far off. Both involve acts of creation and even nurturing to some extent. I feel as though the series makes those connections in sometimes small but significant ways. Like with Big Little Lies, there is such a great ensemble here, including actors I haven't even mentioned like Lu Huang, Rosemarie DeWitt, Geoff Stults, Anika Noni Rose, Jesse Williams, Luke Bracey and Stevonte Hart. At one point, I felt like I was watching Murder on the Orient Express (1974) in terms of the gathering of a great ensemble, which makes the series one of the best of the year in that regard.

Rated TV-MA-LS.
Running Time: 1 hr. / 8 eps.

Available on Hulu.