Delicious shots of suspense
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Big Little Lies. The Show: Big Little Lies, Season 1, Episode 3 The Moment: The therapy session
Celeste (Nicole Kidman) and Perry’s (Alexander Skarsgard) life looks art-directed: gorgeous, rich, with twin sons and a seaside mansion. But there’s a crack in the foundation: he hits her. She hits him back. Now they’re meeting a couples’ therapist (Robin Weigert).
Celeste and Perry sit on the couch. Immediately, it’s uncomfortable. “Things can just get a bit volatile,” Celeste begins. “We fight a lot.”
“I’ve always been afraid she’d go through me,” Perry finally says. “Outgrow me. Figure me out. I’m constantly looking for evidence she doesn’t love me.”
This show is TV crack for me, a juicy, addictive soap opera but with seriously good writing and acting, as if Peyton Place were made like The Wire. (The seven hour-long episodes are written by 1990s TV king David E. Kelley and directed by Canada’s Jean-Marc Vallée.)
Its one flaw: it falls prey to the current fashion of cutting its timeline to ribbons and showing us ultrabrief flashbacks and forwards, images without context that we’re supposed to figure out later.
But then it gives us scenes like the one above, a six-minute squirmer with long two-shots of Kidman and Skarsgard. She keeps darting her eyes at him, desperately reading his face for clues. The suspense in these long takes is both delicious and painful. Big Little Lies airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and is available on demand. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop culture moments. She usually appears Monday to Thursday.