Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ On Hulu, Where Reese Witherspoon And Kerry Washington Face Off In A Battle Of Microaggressions

It seems that Reese Witherspoon has latched onto something over the last few years, producing adaptations of popular novels and nonfiction books. Little Fires Everywhere is an adaptation of Celeste Ng’s novel; Witherspoon and Washington are among the executive producers, and veteran producer Liz Tigelaar is the showrunner. Like Witherspoon’s last two shows, Big Little Lies and The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere tries to couch serious issues in a frothy, soapy environment, where every word uttered can be a possible misunderstanding and tensions run high.

LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Sirens blare and fire engines speed to the scene of a large house engulfed in flames. A woman is standing outside, in shock that her home and everything in it is being destroyed.

The Gist: The Shaker Heights, Ohio home that’s on fire belongs to Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon) and her husband Bill (Joshua Jackson). Sitting in an ambulance, the Richardsons are informed by Lou (Colby French), a neighborhood watch volunteer, that the firefighters found “little fires everywhere,” meaning the fire was set. Both the Richardsons think their youngest daughter Izzy (Megan Stott) did it, but when Lou asks who else might have, we flash back to four months prior, to August of 1997.

Elena lives an idyllic Shaker Heights life. She works as an editor for the local paper (she constantly brags that she interviewed Janet Reno), her routines are perfected, and she and Bill have four kids. Trip (Jordan Elsass) is the handsome jock; Moody (Gavin Lewis) is nerdier but equally overachieving; Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn) is essentially Elena’s mini-me. Izzy, though, likes to dress in black, revealing outfits, and has been skipping orchestra camp rehearsals. She also likes to play with fire, as Elena finds out when Izzy burns off some of her hair. While Bill just thinks she’s a teenager finding herself, Elena can’t even bring herself to call her youngest anything but her given name, Isabelle.

On her ride into work, Elena sees an old car with people sleeping in it, “African-American, I think.” Since that can’t happen in Shaker Heights, she calls it into the cops. The two people in the car are Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) and her 15-year-old daughter Pearl (Lexi Underwood). Mia is a mixed-media artist, and she and Pearl move from town to town at Mia’s whim. When Elena shows the Warrens an apartment in a duplex she owns, Mia wants a month-to-month lease. When Elena recognizes the car as the one she reported in the morning, she relents on the lease requirement.

Of course, her motivations for doing so are mixed. Every time Elena and Mia encounter each other, Elena somehow offends Mia. She clumsily offers Mia a job being her “house manager,” and Mia turns it down with malice, thinking that Elena is offering the job because Mia is Black and Elena thinks she can’t make money as an artist. Mia, for her part, seems to be running from something, as we see in the dreams she has where she’s stalked by someone riding on the subway with her.

Pearl and Moody get to know each other quickly, and Moody gets her a bike and takes her to a hideout he’s created in a dilapidated food truck. There he sings and she reads her poetry. When they get caught for trespassing, the incident tests Mia and Pearl’s extremely close relationship, because Pearl is tired of moving. “I want more than one wall,” she says, referring to the fact that her mom only lets her paint one wall of her room so it can be repainted quickly when they move.

When Mia sees Peal hanging out with the Richardson kids (except Izzy, who’s busy painting something black in the front yard), she asks Elena if the “house manager” job is still available.

Our Take: It’s very easy to parallel Little Fires Everywhere with Big Little Lies; Witherspoon plays similarly prickly, precise characters whose seeming domestic bliss is hiding something darker, and secrets abound. Here, Elena measures her wine pour in a Pyrex cup and thinks it’s sexy to schedule lovemaking with Bill. But the difference with Fires is that this is definitely a Reese vs. Kerry situation, with their characters set to square off in big ways and small throughout the miniseries. It’s about Elena’s white guilt and savior complex against Mia’s mysterious past, her anger over that past, and her distrust of most people, but especially overprivileged ones like Elena.

But here’s the thing about Elena; right now, the character feels flat, someone who’s more about her guilt and tics than anything else. Some of what she says about Mia would have been considered bad in 1997, much less now; for instance, she says this to Bill about offering Mia the house manager job: “Isn’t it more racist to not offer her the job because of her race? Now that’s racist.” Maybe it’s because Witherspoon has played this character before, but Elena doesn’t really go much beyond the TV and movie rich white mother that’s more about image than about anything else.

On the other hand, by the end of the first episode we get a lot of insight into Mia and Pearl’s life. We’ve certainly seen Washington play people with dark pasts before, but none like Mia; her first instinct is to throw walls up and be dismissive of people like Elena, seeing the white guilt and little else. By contrast, Pearl is emotionally open and wants to settle down somewhere and live a normal teenage life. While she’s a little uncomfortable with Elena’s interest in her, she embraces it because she’s seeing it more as warmth than pity.

That shading is what will advance this miniseries past its soapy start. But it’s going to need to do some work to get to that point.

Sex and Skin: Elena and Bill’s scheduled Saturday sex is pretty hot, all things considered.

Parting Shot: Mia is in her darkroom, developing a print of a photo she took surreptitiously.

Sleeper Star: Rosemarie DeWitt plays Elena’s friend Linda McCullough, whose baby Lexie watches. She doesn’t have a ton to do in the first episode, but we’ll likely see more of her coming up. We’re also impressed with Stott’s performance as the unheard Izzy, especially when she goes to her orchestra performance with the words “I AM NOT YOUR PUPPET” on her forehead. This kid is intense.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Lexie, whose boyfriend is Black, says that “Brian says we should be saying ‘Black’ now,” Elena replies, “Well, Jessie Jackson says that we should be saying ‘African-American,’ and he’s on television.” That line could have been a bit… subtler?

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

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Little Fires Everywhere On Hulu