Race and class divide get the spotlight

The miniseries Little Fires Everywhere is set in the 1990s, which its script and soundtrack take great pains to remind you of Sugar Ray and Grey Poupon, Waterfalls and Before Sunrise. There’s even a reasonable onscreen facsimile of the lobby of The New York Times circa 1997.

Watching it, though, you’ll most likely be reminded of a more recent vocabulary. You can almost sense the characters catching themselves just before they refer to one another’s appropriations, microaggressions and code switching. Rarely has a period piece felt this assiduously up-to-date in its racial and gender politics.

Based on Celeste Ng’s bestselling 2017 novel, Little Fires

Everywhere originated with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. And like another Hello Sunshine project, HBO’s Big Little Lies ,it adapts a literary page-turner by a female author into a starring vehicle for Witherspoon.

More pertinently, it also resembles Big Little Lies in the way it evokes the tradition of the Hollywood — you’ll excuse the term — “women’s picture,” movies mostly made by men (Douglas Sirk, George Cukor, William Wyler) that accommodated female stars and domestic situations by wrapping them in sometimes high-pitched melodrama.

Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four and lawyer’s wife in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

She manages a family rental property, which is how she meets Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), an art photographer, and Mia’s teenage daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood).

Elena impulsively offers Mia a job as “house manager” for her family, which really means cooking and cleaning. It’s just the first thing in Little Fires that, while it might happen (it probably felt natural in the book), makes you squint at the screen and think, Really?

The real dramatic downfall, though, is how the deck is stacked against Elena, and therefore Witherspoon, even though it’s her project. The depiction of Elena as a clueless and rigid white suburbanite gets almost cartoonish.

That conception of Elena fits a pattern, an approach‘Little Fires shares with an awful lot of current series: Rather than presenting characters in the round and then developing them, it presents characters as terms in a moral and cultural equation and then slowly reveals their pasts.