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It’s hard to remember when Big Little Lies first debuted on HBO because, in Donald Trump years, it was the equivalent of about three centuries ago. It was February 2017, a mere month after his inauguration and the first Women’s March, and there was so, so much to come. At the moment, however, mostly we were very angry, and that’s when a brand-new show—starring some of the world’s biggest female stars, who were screaming, cursing, philandering, fighting, and eventually murdering—came to television.
A month later and another one had premiered, The Handmaid’s Tale. I think of them together because, though both were filmed long before Trump beat Hillary Clinton (and adapted from books written well before that), they tapped into the feminist outrage zeitgeist that swept popular culture after November 2016, as if they had been hastily created and filmed immediately after November 9. Big Little Lies depicted women raging against their gilded cages (more accurately described as million-dollar mansions on the Northern California coast), many of them struggling with realizing that their domestic lives, connected through their children at the Otter Bay School, were not as satisfying as they had been led to believe. Add in the post-Weinstein MeToo movement of September 2017—which resonated with both the plight of rape survivor Jane (Shailene Woodley’s character) as well as with that of Celeste (Nicole Kidman)—and a subplot about bullying, and watching Big Little Lies, like The Handmaid’s Tale, became a political act itself. As did seeing the powerhouse female cast, with show coproducers in Reese Witherspoon and Kidman, on the red carpet.
But two years on the Resistance media exhaustion has set in. The glut of even more shows, podcasts, hashtags, and pussy hats has amassed and coagulated, like a giant fatberg made of the Wing tote bags. There is a kind of inertia now produced by the mere weight of all of these projects, which seemed poised to deliver us somewhere else. Instead here we still are—very literally in the case of Offred, the Handmaid’s Tale heroine who the show has kept in violent subjugation so that it can create more content, as Sophie Gilbert recently argued in the Atlantic and I lamented last year. Things are, in fact, getting worse—red-cloaked handmaids are still popping up around the country as states adopt even more draconian reproductive restrictions. Their machinations are the results of decades of careful judicial manipulation by the GOP, which is hoping to repeal Roe v. Wade via their prized appointee, Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, he got through too. There is a creeping sense that maybe we should have been paying attention to the highjacking of the federal judiciary instead of watching so much television.
All of this is to say that Big Little Lies season two has blissfully gone the opposite way of The Handmaid’s Tale in that it has distinctly leaned into its own world rather than try to say something about ours. Not that it doesn’t still get at some uncomfortably relevant, horribly intimate issues its women viewers will understand more than the men. In the wake of the death of Celeste’s husband, Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), who abused her and raped Jane, all of the women are grappling with the fallout, legally and emotionally. Celeste even misses Perry despite memories of his violent, sadistic behavior. Madeline (Witherspoon) reckons with the fact that she skipped college to have children young when her own daughter decides she doesn’t need higher education.
But my overall reaction to the first few episodes of the new season made available by HBO was laughter rather than horror, and what a relief it was. The intersection between the luxury lives and high-stakes problems (a murder cover-up, remember?) of the Monterey Five continues in a long tradition of the best camp murder mysteries, in which beautiful, jewel-adorned women shriek their heads off and look great doing it. Each actor, at the height of her game, has leaned into the more ridiculous, frantic aspects of her character’s personality: The typically placid Kidman wakes up screaming “I’m gonna fucking kill you” in the middle of the night. Woodley is prancing around in the ocean to Sufjan Stevens. Zoë Kravitz, as the svelte Bonnie, processes her trauma by looking like shit (to be clear, she still looks incredible). They even have a more outrageously scenic meeting spot, their harbor café having been relocated to an oceanside bar where the chairs look like bird nests. The addition of Meryl Streep to the cast provides the most semi-deranged delight, with her fake, ferret-like teeth and Angela Lansbury bob as she snoops around seeking justice for her son Perry.
It's more than refreshing that creator David E. Kelley, producers Witherspoon and Kidman, and author Liane Moriarty (who consulted on the new season) chose the whodunit route rather than something grittier that might have engendered more think pieces but would have been 10 times less fun to watch. Witherspoon and Laura Dern’s renewed hysterical madness in their respective roles as alpha bitches is the epitome of hyperreality, laying bare the rarefied class dynamics that make these women anything but relatable. “I don’t give a fuck! I don’t care about homeless people!” Madeline screams at her daughter, who wants to leave school to work at a housing start-up. “I will not not be rich!” Renata (Dern) bellows to her feckless husband, a cross between Joan Crawford and Cardi B. These are perhaps not the slogans to be wearing on a T-shirt when one is protesting at the U.S. Capitol—and that’s okay. Because they are fucking funny, and we need all the laughter we can get.