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A stunned Reese Witherspoon watches her picture-perfect home burn to the ground in the pilot for “Little Fires Everywhere.” An adaptation of Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel, the Hulu drama tells the story of two families whose lives collide and are forever changed.
“One day you wake up and your life is settled, and you know who you are, or at least you think you do,” Elena Richardson (Witherspoon) observes. The journalist and mother of four has regular weigh-ins, color coordinates her kids’ lunches, and is a consummate rule-follower. She just can’t make sense of the enigmatic artist and single mother who is new to her town. She first spots Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) and her daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood) when the pair are sleeping in their car. Elena offers to rent them a duplex — largely because it makes her feel good about herself to take them on as tenants — and suggests that Mia might want to work as the “house helper,” AKA maid, in Elena’s mansion across town. Mia is skeptical of the privileged do-gooder’s intentions, and understandably so.
Like the book it’s based on, “Little Fires Everywhere” makes for addictive entertainment. It’s a very bingeable show, with each episode hinting at how Elena and Mia will unravel their respective family’s lives. Despite their intense dislike and disapproval for one another — and each other’s parenting styles — it’s clear that they are simultaneously drawn to one another, and a real highlight of the series comes when they let their defenses down, albeit briefly, and share an intimate, drunken conversation inspired by “The Vagina Monologues.”
The series engages with interesting questions about what it means to be a “good” mother, and deals more with racism than the book: its portrayal of the white Richardson family’s problematic interactions with Mia, Pearl, and Brian (Stevonte Hart), Elena’s daughter’s black boyfriend, add welcome dimensions to the story. The small screen version of the story does, however, lose some of the novel’s strengths, offering decidedly less nuanced portrayals of its characters, and relying too far too heavily on lingering shots and all-too-explicit dialogue to communicate exactly what the characters are thinking and feeling and why they are thinking and feeling this way. “Little Fires Everywhere” would be a better show if it simply trusted its audience to understand subtlety.
Liz Tigelaar (“Casual”) serves as showrunner on “Little Fires Everywhere” and Lynn Shelton (“Sword of Trust”) directed its pilot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWGkX8ClhBI
