MOTHER'S LOVE
A custody battle rages on ‘Little Fires Everywhere’
LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE Wednesday, Hulu
THE complicated relationships between mothers and their children is at the heart of “Little Fires Everywhere.” The eight-part series recently delivered a jolt to viewers when undocumented worker Bebe Chow (Lu Huang) — a co-worker of artist Mia Warren (Kerry Washington) at a Chinese restaurant — crashed a birthday party for a 1-year-old adopted baby girl that she abandoned due to poverty and said she wanted her daughter back. In offering to pay Bebe’s legal expenses as she tries to win back her child, Mia risks alienating Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon), her part-time employer and a good friend of Linda McCullough (Rosemarie DeWitt), the adoptive mother. Showrunner Liz Tigelaar and executive producer Lynn Shelton talked to The Post about this storyline and how the show came together behind the scenes.
Tigelaar: Mia comes into this town to dissect and comment on it through art. She discovers a kindred spirit with Bebe, another outsider. She sees a pain there and has a kind of magnet relationship with her. Mia doesn’t get too close to people. That connection with Bebe ignites the story. In episodes one through three, you see how everything is going to be combustible.
Tigelaar: One of the things we adjusted was to make Bebe an undocumented worker. You understand her backstory and actions better and how she was put into an untenable situation. She was backed into a corner. What happens when you have no support, no safety net? Bebe’s circumstances force you to examine what makes someone a good mother. Shelton: The characters are all motivated by being moms. They don’t want to lose their kids and want to get their kids back. Who should the [baby girl] belong to? The difficult choices mothers have to make was given equal weight with these different characters.
Shelton: The house was in LA’s Hancock Park neighborhood. We made a lot of visits to it with the special visual effects team. We built fireproof replicas of the various windows and doors in the house then shot actual fires by those windows on a special fireproof stage. If you just do the fire completely through a computer, it’s never going to look as good.
Shelton: Liz and I sat down with each of the actors in the beginning and there were continuing discussions [about] who these characters were that were worked out in broad strokes before production. Sometimes that meant Kerry and Reese were reading scripts along the way. In production, sometimes on a shooting day if something didn’t feel right, we would rework a scene.
Shelton: It’s really different in tone and style. Our story is set in Ohio and in the 1990s. “Big Little Lies” is set in the extremely and unbelievably elitist West Coast. Elena is definitely upper middle class. Kerry’s character feels especially different.