Let me ask you a question. Would you like a series that has everything? Good. Because it is, emphatically, HERE.
Big Little Lies is the latest offering (this time adapted from a bestselling book of the same name) from David E Kelley (the creator of Boston Legal and – back in the day, children – Ally McBeal). It is set among the moneyed honeys of Monterey, California, and opens with a murder – of whom and by whom it is not yet revealed, but as we flash back and crack open the brittle carapaces of perfection surrounding all the residents’ lives it becomes deliciously clear that almost everyone is a potential victim, suspect, or both. The townspeople, as they are interviewed in the present day by the police, add something between an unreliable narration and a bitchy Greek chorus to proceedings.
At one level, it’s soapy melodrama. A lot happens in Monterey. A lot. Most of it involves the indefatigable Madeline Mackenzie, stay-at-home-apart-from-the-20-hours-of-community-theatre-she-does-a-week mom, problem-solver and grudge-bearer extraordinaire played by Reese Witherspoon. Imagine a grownup, thwarted Tracy Flick leavened with a dash of Witherspoon’s other most famous role, Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. She takes newcomer and single mother Jane Chapman under her wing when Jane’s son Ziggy is accused without proof of injuring the daughter of Madeline’s nemesis, career woman Renata “I’ve just agreed to sit on the board of PayPal! What was I thinking!” Klein.
Whatever time she can spare from feuding with Renata she spends feuding with her ex-husband and his new, younger wife Bonnie. The divorce was 15 years ago, but wounds will not heal if you spend your days picking at them. The only thing Madeline does not know about the good-ish people of Monterey is the secret her best friend Celeste – Nicole Kidman – is hiding from everyone. She too believes (albeit with greater pleasure and less envy than most) that Celeste’s marriage to her preternaturally sexy husband (Alexander Skarsgård) is as perfect as he looks.
But if it starts off as simply a Desperate Housewives with even more money and even nicer houses (and good jokes – enjoy the mayor who wants to nix Madeline’s production of Avenue Q on the grounds that “We can’t have puppets fucking in Monterey”, and Madeline’s choice of alias under which to post comments on her teenage daughter’s Facebook page; God) it rapidly evolves into something much better.
It sets up all the cliches of female rivalry, maternal hypercompetitiveness and marital fidelity (or lack thereof) and then sets about investigating and deconstructing them, aided by the marquee cast giving, to a man and woman, probably career-best performances. The characters deepen so that, while it may still be clear that if people like this exist, we have indeed entered the endgame of late western capitalism, we no longer want to boot them through their plate-glass coastal windows and enjoy their crumpled bodies spoiling the expensive view. And if its examination of the after-effects of rape is underdone, its portrait of domestic violence – the unspoken compromises, the shifting power plays, the incremental, inexorable escalations, the pervasiveness of denial – is masterly.
Come for the soapy fun but stay – and you will, because the addictive melodramatic element never leaves it – for this. At its core, Big Little Lies has the ring of truth.
Big Little Lies airs in the US on HBO from 19 February and in the UK on Sky Atlantic in March.
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