If you’re going to hunker down with “Big Little Lies” (which I highly recommend), you’re going to need a score card (or a good memory) to keep track of all the gossip, grudges, secrets and lies in this first-rate HBO drama.
Based on Liane Moriarty’s best-seller, the seven-episode series boasts an all-star cast — Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgard, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern, all of whom live up to their advance billing — and an absorbing story (courtesy of TV vet David E. Kelley) that will keep you guessing each and every step of the way.
The series opens in seaside Monterrey, Calif., home to the beautiful people and the wannabes, both jockeying for social status. There’s a murder, and the narrative then backtracks to tell its multi-layered arc in which all the major characters are either suspects or the murder victim (whose identity is not yet revealed).
In the best “Twin Peaks”/“Broadchurch” tradition, not everything is as it seems for the Monterrey parents who send their kids to Otter Bay, a private school breeding a seamy underbelly of petty behavior and resentment (which also festers among its young students). There’s the busybody, chatty mom, Madeline (Witherspoon), whose youngest daughter, Chloe, is about to start 1st grade. (Madeline, as one character says, “has a nose for everybody else’s business.”) There’s Madeline’s best friend, Celeste (Kidman), the mother of identical-twin boys and the envy of her gal friends courtesy of her much-younger husband, Perry (Skarsgard). Jane (Woodley) is the wild card here; she’s a young newcomer to town, a single mom with a mysterious past who just wants the best for her wide-eyed son, Ziggy. And then there’s Renata (Dern), a powerful career woman scorned by the other women for not being a stay-at-home mom to her young daughter, Ammabella. Renata is married to Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling), who tells her: “You all want to be the envy of your friends, but God forbid you garner too much of it.” She is not amused.
The aforementioned murder, which opens the series, occurs after a “Trivia Night” at Otter Bay and exposes the cracks in the main characters’ back stories: Madeline’s ex-husband, Nathan (James Tupper) lives in town, is remarried, has a daughter and poses an emotional (and maybe physical) threat to Madeline and her jealous, stay-at-home husband, Ed (Adam Scott). Celeste and Perry’s marriage — so idyllic on the surface — is troubled and downright weird: he’s got a hair-trigger temper and slaps her around, which she secretly enjoys.
Jane, meanwhile, keeps assuring Ziggy that there’s “nothing wrong” with him, even after he’s accused of trying to choke — and then kiss — Renata’s daughter Ammabella (which he vehemently denies). But Jane is hiding some secrets of her own, including the real reason she moved to Monterrey.
And so it goes.
“I love my grudges — I tend to them like little pets,” Madeline admits, and you’ll learn even more disturbing things about these people (and their children) as the story winds itself down a rocky road littered with intrigue and, ultimately, murder.
It’s a ride well-worth taking.
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