Little Fires Everywhere

As the title suggests, ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ (2020) begins with an inferno.

A picture perfect suburban home is on a raging, blazing fire as a woman watches in shock but also with grim understanding. In the eight episodes that make up this Hulu series, the viewer will speculate about who lit the match but ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ is much more than a whodunnit. 

Instead, the series, based on the bestselling Celeste Ng book of the same name, is a story of motherhood, race, class and the colourblind people who are anything but.

Starring Kerry Washington in her Emmy-nominated role as Mia and Reese Witherspoon as Elena, the series introduces two mothers whose views on life, parenting and even art are the sparks for the fire we know is coming.

Set in ’90s Shaker Heights, Ohio, the novel contrasts Elena’s quintessential suburban mother of four with Mia’s nomadic mixed media artist and mother of one within the confines of lily-white suburbia.

In a departure from the book, which doesn’t specify Mia’s race, in Liz Tigelaar’s adaptation for television Mia and her daughter Pearl, played by Lexi Underwood, are black.

Though it seems a somewhat calculated move given the times, this is something Ng had considered prior to the casting. Speaking to The Atlantic’s Shirley Li, Ng admits that she wanted to take the characters in this direction.

“Initially, I had wanted to write [Mia and her daughter Pearl] as people of colour,” said Ng to Li. “I thought of them as people of colour, because I knew I wanted to talk about race and class, and those things are so intertwined in our country and in our culture […] But I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.”

In ‘Little Fires Everywhere’, building on Ng’s initial idea, Mia and Pearl are black, which adds a racial layer to the story’s central dramas. 

When Elena offers Mia work as her house help and wants to befriend her and own her work, there is a racial power dynamic that Elena seems ignorant to but which today’s demystification of Karens allows everyone to appreciate that deep down, the sweet little white lady knows exactly how much power she wields and what she is doing.

Despite this, Mia is a formidable foe.

Alert, educated and constantly on tenterhooks given her own secrets, Washington plays Mia as brusque, tolerant but ever on the verge of wringing Elena’s neck. 

Witherspoon, for her part, feels familiar in her conception of Elena. A mixture of ‘Big Little Lies’ Madeline with a sprinkle of Elle Woods’ underestimation in her ambition to be a serious journalist after giving up her career to become a Stepford wife and part-time writer for the local. 

Though the show focuses on the two mothers’ regrets, ambitions, missteps and secrets, there is a third mother and this is where Ng builds some of her commentary on race and class.

In addition to helping around Elena’s house, Mia works as a waitress and here she meets a woman named Bebe Chow, played by Huang Lu, who in a fit of post-partum depression left her baby at a fire station.

These three worlds collide in the bowels of affluent suburbia and pit Elena and Mia against each other in a way that is beyond any thinly veiled playing nice.

While these antagonist fires burn, the series also delves into the lives of the women’s children where issues of sexuality, privilege, appropriation, abortion, ownership and blame are explored through the prism of race primarily as Elena’s children interact with Pearl, played affectingly by Underwood.

All told, in ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ there is a lot going on and some of those things are explored more cogently than others as the series tries to grapple with the show’s central whirlwind of Mia and Elena, Bebe, the children and even Elena’s thinly sketched husband, played by Joshua Jackson. 

What distracts from the show’s creep towards melodrama is its excellent cast corralled by the late Lynn Shelton, who was posthumously nominated for a director Emmy for the show after she passed away in May. Stream this for the compelling performances, the dive into the complexity of women and to find out who let it all burn.

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ (2020) now streaming on Showmax.

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