Little Fires Everywhere

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.