The last episode of “Little Fires Everywhere” dropped on Hulu last month, and while showrunner Liz Tigelaar would “love” to do a second season, there are no official plans for the adaptation of Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel to continue. Still, Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s standoff made a major impression — so much so that a “multi-studio bidding war” erupted for the rights to Ng’s debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You,” with Annapurna Television coming out victorious. Variety confirmed the news.
Published in 2014, “Everything I Never Told You” tells the story of the Lees, a mixed-race Chinese American family living in small town 1970s Ohio. An exploration of race, culture, and the lies that we tell others and ourselves, the award-winning book kicks off with the middle child of the family, Lydia, found dead in the local lake. Her shocking death surfaces long-simmering tensions in the family — and reveals that no one, and especially not her parents, really understood her.
Annapurna TV is developing “Everything I Never Told You” as a limited series. Ng will exec produce alongside Mary Lee of A-Major Media, “a production company dedicated to championing Asian American voices in film and TV,” as well as Annapurna’s Megan Ellison, Sue Naegle, Ali Krug, and Patrick Chu.
“I’m certainly still working on not thinking of the default as white. I’m not sure I’m always successful, because for a long time we’ve had a system where we privilege white experience and white culture, and it’s hard to transition to a mindset of ‘Non-white experiences and cultures are also important,'” Ng has said. “It’s hard for everyone — often, if I talk about culture on Twitter, I get a lot of hate-tweets from people who feel threatened by this very idea, who think that people of color are trying to ‘erase’ whiteness. That’s completely the wrong end of the stick, though. Moving away from the default mindset of ‘white = default’ isn’t erasing whiteness — it’s un-erasing the narratives of people of color, it’s making them visible again and granting their stories equal importance,” she emphasized.
