Rumours about authorship disputes don’t get in the way of an entertaining second season of Big Little Lies, reports Dan Slevin.
The "Monterey Five" on alert in Big Little Lies. Photo: HBO
Questions of authorship rarely crop up when talking about television. Star Trek was always clearly a Gene Roddenberry creation, for example. Steven Bochco was the mind behind Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, Jill Soloway controlled Transparent and so on and so forth. Even in the UK, where the concept of showrunner took longer to become established, you have writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft (Dad’s Army) or Lynda La Plante (Prime Suspect). They very rarely directed the shows they wrote.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that when cinephiles saw that Andrea Arnold, maker of Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey and one of the greatest filmmakers of our age, had been assigned to direct the second season of TV drama Big Little Lies, there was always the likelihood of someone being disappointed. Either we were going to get a six-hour Andrea Arnold film starring Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep or we were going to get something that looked like Season One.
In the end, we got a little bit of both but probably not enough of either to be truly satisfying. By all accounts the shoot went extremely well. Executive producers and key cast members Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman (who had recommended Arnold) were very happy. Show creator and industry veteran David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal) delivered scripts but, reportedly, kept his distance. Original director, Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) was shooting another HBO series (Sharp Objects).
Photo: HBO
Once the shoot was complete, Arnold took all the footage home to the UK where she and her team of editors began the job of crafting the material into seven episodes of prestige television. And here is where the problems began.
As reported by Indiewire, Kelley and Vallée (who was still an executive producer and, shall we say, invested in how this was going to look) started to see the output they took steps to take the rest of post-production to Vallée’s base in Montreal.
The result is each episode has between eight and ten credited editors – including Valleé’s son Émile – an absurd number if you don’t take into account some obvious contractual obligations. Vallée also gets a rather pointed “Special Thanks” credit at the end of each episode.
You can see Kelley and Vallée’s point. Television is a brand and audiences have expectations. But someone took their eye off the ball here. And maybe one day we will be lucky enough to see an Arnold director’s cut but I’m not sure that the material deserves the kind of insightful treatment she could offer.
Mary Louise (Meryl Streep) and Celeste (Nicole Kidman) reading to the twins, Josh and Max (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti). Photo: HBO
The story follows the “Monterey Five” for a year after the death of Celeste’s husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) and, even if the cops aren’t hot on their trail, they all feel as if they are. Nicole Kidman as the brutalised but conflicted Celeste was a revelation in Season One – truly one of the all-time great performances – but now she’s up against the astonishing Meryl Streep playing Perry’s suspicious mother.
All of the five are brilliant once again – the acting is the number one reason for watching the second season – and they all have breath-taking moments. But then Streep shows up and wipes the floor with them, effortlessly. She’s a marvel and she’s obviously having a great time. In fact, this might be the most sustained Streep screen time we have seen for a long while.
Each of the five gets a storyline but they aren’t all as strong as each other. Laura Dern’s bravura performance as Renata, the self-made tycoon brought down by her philandering husband, doesn’t get the payoff the performance deserves and Reese Witherspoon’s arc as Madeline drifted into soap opera occasionally.
But it’s worth persevering through to the final episode where, visually at least, you get a sense of what Arnold was doing. It’s the most visually striking – and emotionally resonant – episode even when the actual details of the story (and the legal shenanigans) are a bit wobbly.
Both seasons of Big Little Lies are streaming on Neon. Season One is available on DVD for those of you who like to have a physical object that no one can make disappear on a corporate whim.
