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