Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere” Will Fill The Hole “Big Little Lies” Left In Your Heart
Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington go toe to toe in Hulu’s latest miniseries, “Little Fires Everywhere,” and it really is THAT show.
Little Fires Everywhere is based on the bestselling novel by Celeste Ng, which was published in 2017. The story takes place in a real-life suburb of Cleveland, Ohio called Shaker Heights, and it’s chock-full of ‘90s references, music, and fashion. It focuses on two families: the wealthy Richardson family and mom Elena (Witherspoon), and single mom Mia Warren (Washington) and her daughter Pearl. The series sets up by previewing how it all ends — the Richardson’s home being deliberately burnt to the ground — and each episode leads up to the tragedy. If you loved HBO’s “Big Little Lies” (also starring Witherspoon), then you’ll definitely like this.
Elena Richardson is a type-A control freak who color codes her jam-packed family calendar, and Mia Warren is a freelance artist who moves around the country on a whim. Racial dynamics are a big theme of the show, and the main characters are all women with strong, albeit completely different, personalities. New episodes drop on Hulu every Wednesday, and there will be eight in total. Three were released at once with the debut last week, and I devoured them all in one sitting.
It’s a show that takes a magnifying glass to not only mother-daughter relationships, but also to family dynamics in general. Will the stiff, upper-middle-class mom befriend the free-spirited single mom, or will they end up as enemies? Will Richardson’s emo daughter be the one to burn the house down, or will it be her husband who’s restricted to a sex schedule? Maybe it will be Warren’s daughter Pearl, who we see starting to hold resentment towards her mom’s hippie lifestyle in the first three episodes. Can’t wait to find out!
My only gripe is, can Hulu just go ahead and drop all of these at once, please? Don’t they know we’re all going stir crazy under quarantine?