Little Fires Everywhere

Alanis nostalgia aside, Little Fires Everywhere could have easily taken place in 2020 as the stories are resonant and topical. ... With a solid cast led by Witherspoon and Washington — not to mention, standout performances by Jade Pettyjohn, Lexi Underwood, and Megan Stott — Little Fires Everywhere takes its subject matter seriously and is unafraid to look at the uncanny, repulsive, and terrifying pieces of America.

Hulu's sharp, soapy and emotional intense limited series is more than your standard suburban whodunit. ... There's also a rich and satisfying teen drama nestled inside Little Fires' saga of adult ennui. The young cast - especially Stott as the angsty Izzy and Lewis as the lovelorn Moody - is impressive. [Mar 2020, p.90]

The show could be set in the present day. Its themes, particularly those surrounding what defines motherhood, are timeless. The conversation around race and privilege are perhaps even more relevant today than the era in which the show is set. Washington is fantastic as Mia. ... [Witherspoon] has perfected the entitled character who is blind to her own entitlement, living a life that is so controlled and carefully cultivated that she may have even lost sight of what she truly wants in life.

Little Fires Everywhere offers an at-times fascinating exploration of parenting, privilege, motherhood, even womanhood, but its overall message is clear: Eventually, parents just have to let go.

“Fires” burns bright in its first episode and beyond, promising an engrossing, fast-moving, character-driven drama that becomes deeper and more disturbing as the story unspools.

The leads are well cast, although Washington’s is the better part. Her Mia is spiky but industrious and willing to change her mind. Few actresses do priggish better than Witherspoon, and she gives Elena plenty of Stepford hauteur, but the role is underwritten.

A new spin on a story that is uncanny, familiar and highly relatable.

Not everything burns equally bright in this twisty saga. ... But any time the moms step into the spotlight--Rosamarie De Witt is also terrific as a desperately needy adoptive other--Fires scorches with emotional intensity. [16-29 Mar 2020, p.10]

A properly addicting series. ... It’s one iconic actress acting against type, and another shading what she does best. For all the imperfections and missteps in adapting the source material, these lead performances are what light the match. It’s the fire you tune in to see burn.

Little Fires Everywhere feels like the second season of "Big Little Lies" that viewers wanted (or at least deserved), and not just because Reese Witherspoon is essentially playing the same character. A juicy adaptation of Celeste Ng's bestselling novel, the Hulu limited series dishes out an enticing mystery against a soapy backdrop of class and racial divides.

Witherspoon, who practically owns the franchise on uptight white women, gives this one an even bigger nudge. At times, “Little Fires” looks like a Marc Cherry potboiler. Washington, meanwhile, reacts like she’s in something more significant. That pull adds to the story’s allure and pushes our sympathies to others. ... “Little Fires Everywhere” doesn’t have the heft of “Pretty Little Lies,” but it should spark discussions about privilege, race and expectations.

Any worries Witherspoon might be spreading herself thin as an actor are dispelled the second she appears onscreen and disappears into the role of Elena Richardson. ... Subtle and not-so-subtle themes of institutional racism and class warfare are in the forefront throughout “Little Fires Everywhere.”

Little Fires Everywhere has issues, but it’s a very watchable show that should be buoyed by Witherspoon’s and Washington’s performances.

Clumsy dialogue aside, “Little Fires Everywhere” is entertaining as a high-end soap opera driven by star power, a little bit of mystery and lots of ‘90s pop culture references.

“Little Fires Everywhere” lands with confidence between the allure of prestige streaming television and a Shonda Rhimes-like propensity for soap suds. Flaws are few, but crucial. Episodes dawdle and dabble too long in too many convoluted story lines. ... By the seventh episode, the central act of arson feels more like a group effort, after so many family members and neighbors have been betrayed. It’s possible to savor the series and yet also root for the flames.

Little Fires Everywhere is an effective, well-acted drama with some moments of real depth. Those moments of real depth just made me wish it achieved such moments more consistently.

Little Fires Everywhere is rarely provocative. But not for nothing, it's better at engaging with race and class than Big Little Lies was.

The larger conflict between the two mothers — and the storyline that ultimately makes this middlebrow melodrama feel increasingly smaller and less resonant through its mostly absorbing eight-episode run (of which seven installments were made available to critics) — is the opposing sides they take on a Solomonic case involving a 1-year-old infant left at a fire station. ... Its exploration of why women often feel more alienated from than connected to one another is far from lean-in aspirational, but at least it's honest.

Suspense shows up in the “secrets” that are inevitable in stories this soap operatic. Because that’s what this is, mysteries, conflicts and relationships teased out over eight hours — no cliffhangers — building back towards that opening blaze. And “on the nose” or not, even if the parts don’t much in the way of “She’s really stretching here,” there’s something to be said in very good actresses taking a pitch, right in their wheelhouse, and belting it.

The series never loses sight of its fraught interplay of race and class, but the initial intensity with which it explores those subjects dims as melodramatic coincidences and speeches accumulate.

It's a show that's sometimes funny, sometimes, touching, often disturbing, and almost always hard to look away from except in horror.

It’s a pleasure to watch Washington lean into her well-known strengths. But where Witherspoon has done a smart job finding other recent parts (including Big Little Lies' busybody Madeline) that feel like interesting variations on her most familiar roles. ... For all the problems [Big Little Lies] had in its second season, it had a surer sense of how to tell its story, and how to use Witherspoon. These Little Fires ultimately don’t burn hot enough.

As a nighttime soap, the episodes can be juicy, biting entertainment, but as the drama stacks up, it loses power. Watching Washington dig deep again and again dulls the effect of her quivering lip and trembling voice; seeing Witherspoon wrap her villainous cloak ever-tighter feels suffocating, and somewhere amid the first seven episodes, the fire goes out under a blanket of melodrama.

For all the intense and scalding emotional infernos in “Little Fires Everywhere,” its tendencies to lean into the hot agitation of blood and thunder just becomes too sweltering to bear and averting the disasters in overplaying drama becomes impossible.

This show (which will run for eight episodes total; I’ve seen seven) lapses into flatness whenever it possibly can, and it is always very ready to tell you exactly who is right and who is wrong in any given situation. In the end, it all ends up feeling exhausting.

Rather than presenting characters in the round and then developing them, it presents characters as terms in a moral and cultural equation and then slowly reveals their pasts. For the viewer, the surprises are in the revelations and not in the choices the characters make, and rather than seeing the characters grow and change, we just see them being moved around the game board.

A story about class and race that strenuously avoids saying “class” or “race,” the adapted “Little Fires Everywhere” does contain enough bad behavior to make it a guilty pleasure. Even if guilt is the principal ingredient that the show is missing, and to a fatal degree. ... What keeps a viewer from empathizing with any of the lead characters is their utter lack of introspection.

The miniseries maintains a distracting focus on the characters played by its producer-stars in a way that undercuts the sense you get, reading Ng’s book, which divides its attention more equally among a dozen characters, that sleepy, self-satisfied Shaker Heights is the story’s true protagonist. These performances aren’t exactly incompetent, but they do feel a bit automated.

“Little Fires Everywhere” feels, more than anything, contained. Grant that there are, in moments, signs of something doing more than simply simmering on low. But those moments are little indeed.

Little Fires Everywhere, I realized, must be what watching Big Little Lies is like for people who don’t like Big Little Lies. In my eyes, though, that show managed to find a way to elevate this kind of soapy, pulpy material into something great. Little Fires Everywhere, sadly, does not.