Big Little Lies: Season 2

If there's a saving grace for the second season of Big Little Lies, it's that it as soon as most people realized, "wait, what the hell, this is all so messy and pointless," it was already over. A report came out a few weeks ago suggesting that the season had been compromised by a creator taking creative control back from the director by employing like seven full-time editors to hack said director's vision to bits, and that goes a long way toward explaining why all of these episodes were like, forty-five minutes long at most. Still, I wonder just how much actual plot could have possibly ended up on the cutting room floor!

Last season was presented as a bit of a pulpy murder mystery with a Greek chorus of regular people in town being interviewed about a fateful night on which one of the main characters was murdered. It was plenty dumb, but it was aware of how dumb it was, aware of how the entire appeal of such a scandal rested on "the rich ladies in town all had petty grudges against each other," and it threw in precocious kids and worthless, absent husband-fathers and all kinds of real estate porn and made it all just, I dunno, work.

This season, in addition to elevating Laura Dern and Zoe Kravitz from secondary characters to main characters and cutting episode lengths, they went ahead and threw Meryl fucking Streep into the mix. And hey, why not! I get it, and I get the appeal, and I bought in on the second season hook, line, and sinker. But God, what a mess!

For starters, while last season was about three (generously, five) women whose stories began to intertwine and come together, this season was about those same five women each just kind of doing their own thing. Reese Witherspoon was angry about her kid not going to college, then sad about her marriage falling apart. That was it. That was her arc. Shailene Woodley just kind of slowly fell for a coworker at the aquarium. That was it! That was her arc! Laura Dern really stepped it up and became arguably the second-biggest character this season, and still her arc was just that her husband did all kinds of white collar crime and as such she lost all of her wealth, and she was pissed at him. The cathartic conclusion to her arc was smashing all his shit with a baseball bat and screaming at him. I mean, hey, that's a fantastic use of Laura Dern! But it's also such a small, simple story.

The central thrust - the only thrust, really - this season was Meryl Streep's attempt to take custody of her grandchildren away from their mother, Nicole Kidman. But even that felt weirdly flat and hollow! The whole season just came across as both unfinished and pared down from that unfinished state. Like, "ah, okay, we're building toward something, and we're doing it pretty quickly, and - oh, oh, it's over now? Hmm."

And that leaves the show in the worst kind of position at the end of its second season - wide open, narratively, for a third season, but with no compelling reason to continue to exist.