Last year, I watched Game of Thrones by asking a friend each Monday morning what horrors had been visited upon the show’s women characters the evening before. Based on her report, I decided whether I'd continue to watch.
Behold the embarrassing price of admission for prestige television: If you want to see a smart, complicated lady, hope you’re cool with a side of sexual violence and general debasement.
Since November, I haven't had the patience for it. I didn't even try with Westworld. I'm no longer interested in TV that promises me complex women characters in a plot seemingly constructed by 14-year-old boys. So when I found out HBO was adapting Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies, I was READY.
It should come as no surprise that Big Little Lies, which stars Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, and Shailene Woodley as moms in a fancy beach community where a MYSTERY IS AFOOT, is not based on literary fiction. Moriarty isn’t a tremendous prose stylist (neither is George R.R. Martin, sorry). Big Little Lies the book is overlong by about 200 pages and has a lollipop on the cover.
It also happens to be genre fiction at its best.
I woke up early to read it every day it was in my possession. If you liked Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you will also like Big Little Lies' unspooling mystery set in a community of affluent helicopter parents whose ranks contain more sociopaths than Moriarty’s breezy prose and beach-read shelfmates would have you initially expect. Lollipop or no, the book—and the series—are both pretty violent, but the violence is never stylized or played for titillation as it is in other HBO source material. Moriarty’s depictions of violent misogyny are less gratuitous, and frankly smarter. The ways that women are dehumanized and devalued in Big Little Lies is also how they are dehumanized and devalued in real life. It’s not gritty realism. It’s just realism. One of the series' greatest successes is in translating this from Moriarty's book. A kind of ordinary interpersonal violence is folded almost imperceptibly into the premiere, and it's a harbinger of much darker things to come.
But perhaps most notably, this is unapologetically a show about women—and specifically women over 40, who for too long have simply not existed on TV. You could make the case that it's a show with five female leads. They DO spend an awful lot of time drinking wine on their patios, and the dialogue IS often clunky, and Jean-Marc Vallée sure does LOVE this one shot of waves breaking against a large rock. But I’m too sick of seeing complex women Trojan Horsed in shows clearly designed to appeal to men to see Big Little Lies as anything but delightfully refreshing. It will do. I won’t make fun of your sex robots if you don’t make fun of that.
