Perhaps the biggest lie Big Little Lies ever told was that it needed a second season. With six episodes down and the finale on deck for Sunday, what was an engaging miniseries in its first go-round has softened into storytelling pudding upon its return. Bursts of crackling, cackle-inducing humor and satire have shined through (thanks in large part to the inimitable Laura Dern), but they have failed to outweigh the show’s dull, redundant mush.
Big Little Lies tried to justify its second season. It never did.
Season two’s delightful soapiness can’t make up for its weak, repetitive drama.
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
It’s not the actresses’ fault — the talented cast have done their best to elevate what they’ve received. Nor is it director Andrea Arnold’s folly. As reported last week, Arnold’s true vision of the show was never seen, as HBO, showrunner David E. Kelley, and season one director Jean-Marc Vallée edited Arnold’s work in post-production.
At the core, the problem of Big Little Lies’ second chapter is confused storytelling.
Last season’s mystery surrounding Perry Wright’s death provided the show’s backbone, an intriguing draw that the series, even in its soapiest moments, would always come back to. Kelley, credited with writing all seven episodes this season, has seemingly tried to make the custody battle between Perry’s mother Mary Louise and Celeste this season’s analogue for season one’s mystery, but he hasn’t really found the right rhythm for it. Big Little Lies is still delivering satire and soap opera, but it’s dropping the ball in some of the more emotional and thoughtful scenes involving the show’s less comedy-driven characters, like Jane and Bonnie. And the result has been a season of Big Little Lies made up of a few hit singles and a bunch of forgettable album tracks, rather than a solid season of good television through and through.
This season works better as a meme than as a season of television
Thinking back on the last six episodes, the Big Little Lies scenes I can recall with blistering clarity involve Laura Dern’s Renata Klein belittling the men in her life (I will not not be rich!”). Among the others are Meryl Streep’s Mary Louise letting out a banshee scream at the dinner table, and one involving a slap Nicole Kidman’s Celeste delivered to Mary Louise’s face, sending a jolt through that mousy brown bob.
These scenes are the best thing about this show. I play them — especially Laura Dern rapping her finger on the jail glass — in my head over and over. Just examine the combination of words in this sentence and its ridiculous summation (of a scene that totally happened this season, in episode three): “Renata threatens to rise up and crush her daughter’s principal like the pissant he is because her daughter Amabella suffered an anxiety attack at the Otter Bay Elementary school because the school’s curriculum involved repeated discussions about climate change and sustainability.”
And while these specific moments are so good and so memorable, it’s also a sign of how not-great this season is that the only performances worth noting are ones spilling over in suds and steeped in high-octane satire.
But much of the scenes making up the dramatic thrust of the season — like anything involving the revelation of abuse in Bonnie’s past or Jane’s journey to build trust in her relationship with Corey — are markedly less memorable. It’s hard to recall one, save for Bonnie’s fantasy about smothering her mother, that felt powerful enough to watch over and over again. The same goes for any of the other interactions between the main characters that aren’t caked in cheese and melodrama. In the hands of a less talented cast, the show’s warts might be even more glaring and these scenes even duller.
Emotionally, it’s confusing to square a show that fully leans into the satire and comedy of financial ruin with the characters of Jane or Bonnie, who seem to come from a more somber, emotionally devastating show.
It’s not that Kelley can’t turn around a powerful story without sacrificing its grounding. Some of the best scenes last season involved Celeste and her therapist, who played an elegant game of cat and mouse that gracefully tapped into something honest and human about how one rationalizes blame and how asking for help isn’t as simple as it seems. I’ve found myself searching for themes like that this season, to no avail.
Knowing now that Arnold, a talented director with a unique aesthetic, wasn’t able to execute her vision seems to give context for much of our disappointment. And the way the show has positioned and promoted itself as championing women and their stories now also feels hollow. But it’s hard to say how dramatically different the show would have been had Arnold’s work made it to the screen untouched. We’ll never know for sure if her direction alone could elevate the season’s uneven writing into something more cohesive, more powerful, and more memorable than the assembly of memes and scenery-chewing we got instead. And that is the biggest, hardest truth to swallow.
