David E. Kelley’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel is a soap in a good coat, and the coat is superb: Vallée’s cutting, Kidman’s marriage, Witherspoon’s mouth. The murder frame is a tease it barely needs, and the second series never quite finds a reason to exist.
David E. Kelley has adapted Liane Moriarty’s novel into seven episodes about five mothers in Monterey, California, whose children have just started at the same school, one of whom will be standing near a body at the end of term. It is a soap, filmed and cut like a serious drama, and mostly it earns the disguise. It is about what women say to each other in car parks and what husbands do when the door is shut.
Reese Witherspoon’s Madeline Mackenzie is the engine, a woman who has never lost an argument she could hear, marching through the school gates with a grievance ready. Nicole Kidman’s Celeste Wright is her opposite, a former lawyer in cream and camel in a glass house on the cliff with Alexander Skarsgård’s Perry and their twin boys. Shailene Woodley’s Jane Chapman is the outsider, renting, watchful, protective of her son Ziggy (Iain Armitage). Laura Dern’s Renata Klein treats the school as a board she has not yet taken over. Zoë Kravitz’s Bonnie, married to Madeline’s first husband Nathan (James Tupper), forgives everyone, which Madeline finds unforgivable.
Jean-Marc Vallée directs the first series and edits alongside Justin Lachance, Véronique Barbe, David Berman, Sylvain Lebel and Maxime Lahaie, and the cutting is the style. A conversation over coffee is broken by two seconds of surf hitting rock, a child’s face, a hand on a doorframe. The other parents, who gossip to the police about the five women as if they were a football team, are cut in as a chorus. For three episodes the device is funny and useful; by the sixth it is a habit the series cannot break.
The scenes between Kidman and Skarsgård are where the series stops being a soap. Perry is charming at breakfast and something else in the bedroom, and the series shows both with the same steady camera and no music to tell us how to feel. We watched with our shoulders up, unsure whether Celeste would name what was happening to her, because Kidman plays a woman who has built a legal argument in her head for why it is not what it looks like. Skarsgård is good enough that we understood why she wanted the argument to hold. It is the best work here and the reason to see it.
John Paino’s production design tells you the money before anyone speaks: Celeste’s house is glass and grey stone and the sea, Renata’s is a fortress with a view, Jane’s rented cottage has a kitchen you could cross in two steps. Alix Friedberg dresses the women so that you could pick out their tax bracket from across a playground. No composer is credited and the series does not miss one; the songs are chosen on screen by the characters and their children.
The flaws are Kelley’s. His dialogue has a way of saying the theme out loud, and Dern’s Renata is written as a cartoon for several episodes before the series lets her be a person; Dern makes the turn look easy, but it should not have taken so long. Adam Scott’s Ed exists to be decent, and Woodley’s backstory is parcelled out so carefully we grew impatient with it. Most critics have been warmer than we are about the mystery frame. It is the weakest thing here, a whodunit promised to viewers who came for the marriage.
The second series, directed by Andrea Arnold, adds Meryl Streep as Mary Louise Wright, Celeste’s mother-in-law, who moves in and asks questions in the tone of a woman who has already decided the answers. She screams at a dinner table and the table does not know where to look; neither did we, and we enjoyed it. Around her, the series has finished its story and is reluctant to admit it; the plot circles for seven episodes looking for somewhere to land.
See the first series for Kidman. Treat the second as a long dinner with people you like, at which Streep has been seated next to the one person she should not have been. It carries a 15, and the certificate is not for the language.
