One thing that struck me while watching Little Fires Everywhere is the first shot of the series is that of one pretty forking big fire. Okay so it explained by the Fire Marshall that the big fire was started with little fires everywhere and accelerant. But of course being a television show, little fires everywhere is quite obvious a metaphor for probably a few different things. And is not just that someone burned down this house, they did it with someone inside. Then we promptly flash back four months where we are introduced to two very different families.
Reece Witherspoon spent a quarter century being a huge movie star but all of the sudden she has become the new queen of prestige television with what you can essentially call the Reece Witherspoon Book Club. Three years ago she turned Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies into an HBO smash hit. Last year she launch Apple+ with The Morning Show based Brian Stelter book. And now she is adapting the Celeste Ng book Little Fires Everywhere for Hulu.
Like Big Little Lies, Reece’s character in Little Fires Everywhere can best be described as grown up Tracy Flick. Again she is playing a very type-A personality trying to exude a very specific persona to the world, you know, the kind of person who weighs herself to the tenth but only has sex on certain day and does not even break that rule if it is just a little past midnight. But there is where the comparisons to her other show ends (well, okay, Joshua Jackson as her husband is as ineffectual as Adam Scott except for maybe one scene in a court room late in the season). The show, is set in 1997 mixed middle class Shaker Height, Ohio, and is really just two woman dealing with their families instead of the super-rich lives of five (six if you count Meryl Streep).
The other woman is played by Kerry Washington who is new to Shaker and needs a new place to stay with her and her teenaged child. A chance run in with Reece, who gets introduced with an Annie Lennox song, gives Kerry, who gets introduced with an Erikah Badu song, a place to stay and a new job. Needless to say there would be no show if these two strong willed women got along, but Reece’s trying so hard not to be perceived as racist, well, comes off as a little racist. Then Kerry is not very good at letting micro-aggressions go.
With only two families at the heart of the story, some of the heavy lifting is left to the five children in the two families and where Little Fires Everywhere fails to live up to Big Little Lies is that these kids are no Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, or Zoey Kravitz. The best of the bunch is Reece’s youngest of four who is just shooting daggers for the first couple episodes (and gets thrown under the bus by her siblings during the opening moments) but kind of just disappears before trotting down the hallway to 2Pac in the penultimate episode (the last of which I saw so I not sure how the season ends) in one of the show's more entertaining moments. While Reece’s two boys took me a couple episodes to tell apart. Then her eldest is trying way too hard to playing a mimi-Reese.
One person who actually does a good job playing mini-Reese is AnnaSophia Robb who shares an episode with The Chi’s Tiffany Boone who plays a younger Kerry in duel flashbacks. Robb’s performance makes me wonder why she only seems to be cast in Hulu award bait for other actors (like last year’s The Act). Please Hollywood, how about giving Robb her own show again instead of wasting her on bit parts. But this was a weird episode just because it also features Veronica Mars’ Alona Tal, Cloak and Dagger’s Aubrey Joseph, Grey Anatomy’s Jesse Williams, and Tomorrowland’s Britt Robertson all of which are in two scenes or less. Kind of a waste for actors whom I at least can recognize. I cannot imagine they will show up in the one episode I have yet to watch.
Despite opening up with arson, this really is not much of a whodunit. Reece’s youngest is an early suspect, but by the time you give episode seven, there really are not that many subjects. Really it is kind of obvious early on it will be kind of silly if it turns out to be someone else. The show actually turns into a court battle which actually is a bigger mystery of how the court will rule. But unless there are some big moments in the final episode Little Fires Everywhere will just turn out to be another in a long list of shows striving to be prestige TV that ends up being a solid B at best.
Three episodes of Little Fires Everywhere premiere tomorrow on Hulu with a new episode premiering every Wednesday after that.
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