‘Little Fires Everywhere’ ignites over race and class

The Hulu miniseries “Little Fires Everywhere” is set in the 1990s, a fact that its script and soundtrack take great pains to remind you of: Sugar Ray and Grey Poupon, “Waterfalls” and “Before Sunrise.”

Watching it, though — three of its eight episodes appeared Wednesday, followed by one each week — 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 that accommodated female stars and domestic situations by wrapping them in sometimes high-pitched melodrama.

And while “Little Fires,” developed by Liz Tigelaar (“Brothers and Sisters,” “Casual”), is staged and edited at a calm, even deliberate, pace, with a variety of melancholy cover versions of peppier

’90s songs, there’s no way to get around the melodramatic core of the material.

Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four and lawyer’s wife in the ur-suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. She also works part time at the local newspaper — her dreams of a big-city career were scuttled by motherhood — and 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).

Mia and Pearl are constantly on the move, migrating in their beat-up car from city to city, a lifestyle that Mia attributes to her art practice and that the even-tempered, precociously intelligent Pearl grimly tolerates. When they rent Elena’s apartment, a spark is struck and the do-gooder 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 could happen (it probably felt natural in the book), makes you squint at the screen and think, Really? The fiercely proud and cosmopolitan Mia resists, but when Pearl befriends the Richardson children — and is entranced by their comfortable, stable Shaker Heights life — Mia takes the job so she can keep an eye on her daughter.

It’s an unlikely setup. And the improbabilities compound themselves in a subplot that becomes the main action of the story, involving a Chinese waitress (Huang Lu), in the country illegally, who lives at the restaurant where Mia works nights and who’s looking for the baby she left outside a firehouse while afflicted with postpartum depression.

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: 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. For the viewer, the surprises are in the revelations and not in the choices the characters make, and rather than seeing the characters grow and change, we just see them being moved around the game board.

HULU Kerry Washington, left, as Mia Warren and Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson in “Little Fires Everywhere.”