Review: Little Fires Everywhere
Wednesday, March 25, 2020 at 2:05PM 
This review only covers the first three episodes of Little Fires Everywhere.
In the second episode of the new Hulu miniseries Little Fires Everywhere rich privileged white woman Elena Richardson (Reeese Witherspoon) asks the nomad artist Mia (Kerry Washington), who is her new tenant, to be her maid. You see she means well. She saw Mia and her teenage daughter asleep in their car and of course as any upstanding citizen would do, called the police on them for trespassing. Out of guilt she leased them her open apartment when by coincidence she recognized them later in the day. Now Mia has told her that she needs to juggle more than one job to make ends meet. The offer comes out naturally out of Elena's mouth. Only after she finishes saying the words does she realize what she has said and how it can be misconstrued. She back tracks by changing the job to “house manager.”
That scene is fraught with racial, class and socio-economic tension. It made me excited for the series and for watching Witherspoon and Washington tackle these issues...
Alas the rest of the series is not that interested and would rather spend copious amounts of its running time with the five teenage actors right out of central casting who play Elena’s two boys and two girls and Mia’s daughter. Why when you have two bonafide stars and fantastic actresses leading your cast? The logic escapes me.
The teenagers have the usual teenage problems, stuff that has been covered in many TV dramas. There’s Izzy (Megan Scott), Elena’s youngest daughter who’s rebellious, being bullied at school and might be queer. There’s Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn), Elena’s oldest daughter who’s an ambitious go-getter just like her mother. Elena’s son Moody (Gavin Lewis) is a sensitive cinephile who pines for Pearl, Mia’s daughter. Pearl (Lexi Underwood) in turn is more interested in his older brother Trip (Jordan Elsass), the jock. We've seen these dynamics many times and this bunch of young actors never manage to play these characters in new or interesting ways.
The series deepens the matchup between Elena and Mia as mothers. Izzy is attracted to Mia’s DGAF attitude while Pearl seeks Elena’s help and admires her normalcy and domesticity that are in direct contrast to the volatile secretive Mia. There’s also another mystery involving Elena’s friend Linda (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her newly adopted daughter that I assume will boil over and further put Elena and Mia on opposing sides. So a war is possibly coming.
However so far the series has wasted a golden opportunity in further exploring this relationship. The character of Mia was not African-American in the novel by Celeste Ng, that has to be the work of Liz Tigelaar who is cedited as creator and showrunner of the miniseries. Casting Washington was a master stroke and made the latent hostility between the characters more potent. They don't’ just not like each other and have different beliefs but there are societal and racial forces to account for, too. Sadly the series within the first three episodes does not fully explore this dynamic. Elena is thinly drawn as an obviously villainous "white savior” and Witherspoon is repeating her performance from Big Little Lies with less nuance and shading. Washington is too opaque perhaps because Mia’s evasiveness seems less like character development and more a writer’s clutch to keep something in reserve for the second half of an eight hour miniseries. C
Reader Comments (9)
I've only watched the first two episodes but i share your concerns. I wonder if they thought the casting was going to do half of the work. But once you add to the ideas in that way, you also have to do *more* work to flesh out the repercussions. I think both actresses are going too hard at the roles in the first two episodes as well. Onscreen tensions always ignite best when you actually like both characters or love to hate them or whatever. But when both characters are offputting?
Thanks for the write-up, Murtada. Four episodes in and I'm having the same issues myself. Episode three ends with an inciting event that would seem to propel the series into an entirely different direction than what episode one sets us up for... The problem is episode three had to work double overtime to get to that ending. (And episode four doesn't get much better since it doubles down on the lukewarm teenager stories.)
There are the raw elements of a great television here, not the least of which casting Reese and Kerry who can shift acting tone and style when given good material and solid direction. Lacking that, this isn't even messy enough to serve as decent camp, it's just a chore to watch. Everyone is acting like they are on completely different shows from each other, even within the same scene. Rosemary DeWitt has a really great breakdown in episode four and my buddy turned to me and said "I don't know what show she's on, but I really wish we were watching that one."
Not sure what Kerry Washington is doing at all. Her Mia seems to lack any clear motivation so far. She's just openly antagonist to everyone, except one of her coworkers with whom she wields empathy like a sledgehammer. I can see where the show is likely holding back on giving us the real backstory on Mia, but its making a huge calculated risk that we actually care about the mystery. And withholding much-needed exposition as a dangling carrot to hold our interest, only to wield it as an oversimplified character motivation to justify otherwise nonsensical behavior and have audiences examine past events from a newly informed perspective is almost as played out a TV trope as the in media res cold open.
The show's open presents a mystery: Who burned down the house?
Four episodes in and I'm certain I don't really care. I say burn it all down and give us a proper Big Little Lies season 2.
I read a comment from someone that suggested how much more interesting things would’ve been if they had switched roles and I am here for that show.
Teppo2 - That would be a much more interesting show.
Can we talk about how poorly this show inundates the viewer with constant 1990s references? I'm rewatching The Americans right now, which conveys its modern period setting so realistically by not dropping pop cultural references into every exchange between characters (or even every episodes), and it's such a contrast with this series. Plus, several of the references are off - eg, Reese's character believes people mock her daughter with references to Ellen because they think she's funny, but anyone who was aware of Ellen DeGeneres in 1997 would have known a derogatory Ellen joke at the time was a reference to homosexuality.
I think the show is much better than you are giving it credit for. Also, Elena is a much different beast than Madeline Martha McKenzie in BLL. Reese is too smart of an actress to play the same notes again. Elena is self-righteous to a fault. Madeline doesn’t GAF if people don’t like her - in fact, she feeds on it. I’m willing to give this show a chance.
I watched the fourth episode last night, and, like Aaron, I think the show is better than the writeup suggests. Yeah, it's no BLL (and I keep accidentally calling iit as it "Big Fires Everywhere"), but it's a welcome soapy diversion from the world falling apart around us right now. And I especially love Kerry Washington in the show, who is daring to be unlikeable with that perpetual sneer that sometimes morphs into a fake smile...I just love watching her. This does nothing to expand Reese Witherspoon's repertoire, but she has such a narrow range in the best of times -- so the role does seem perfect for her. And the show is confronting race in easy-to-digest but nonetheless frank ways. All in all, I'm glad I'm watching.
A show where Reese plays the second fiddle to a much better female role? Sign me up!
With Big Little Lies and The Morning Show as well, she sure is having a lot of fun huh?
Now if she and Kerry switched role, indeed that would have been way more exciting.
So I haven’t gotten around to this one yet but I have read the book, and it spends a LOT of time on the perspectives of the kids (about equal to how much it does on the moms) and the dynamics you describe between them sound pretty much like how they were in the book. The difficulty of transfer, as always with this kind of book, is the difficulty of translating the characters’ inner monologues and trains of thought into their onscreen performances. Even Reese’s character is not the simple privileged beeyotch she seems on the surface, but you only get a fuller understanding of her from her thoughts and reflections.
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