Season two of Big Little Lies seduces with a dark heart and Meryl’s prosthetic teeth

He’s the man responsible for some of the biggest television shows over the past 30 years, but it has taken Foxtel’s Big Little Lies to finally get Annette Sharp to keep watching one of his shows.

• Stefanovic’s surprising new 2GB gig
• Unknown Sydney actor lands big US TV gig

As I see it, you are a David E. Kelley fan or you’re not.

A Reese Witherspoon fan — or not.

A Nicole Kidman fan — or not.

I’ve never been a Kelley or Witherspoon fan and until last year I had successfully managed to avoid most of Kelley’s work.

As a newly minted adult in 1986, I was far too busy living a great big life when Kelley first swept to fame as a screenwriter on LA Law. I was 18 in 1986 and the only compulsive viewing that year was Rage, The Young Ones, Blackadder and Blah Blah Blah.

Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern in Foxtel’s Big Little Lies.

You don’t sit in front of the television when you’re 18.

You skip dinner, go to the uni bar and dance until it’s five minutes to closing time at Wollongong’s only late-night schnitzel joint. Then, as the clock approaches 3am, you rush to take a seat at Mamma’s with half a dozen starving pals and order a schnitzel too corpulent to fit on the restaurant’s largest plate. Six hours later you’re back at your desk at the local newspaper, chasing anything you can catch and living the poor yet rich life of a $250-a-week cadet journalist.

MORE OPINION FROM ANNETTE SHARP:

Reality star to spend two weeks behind bars after drug raid

Kidman’s daughters set to follow in her acting footsteps

As a result, I never saw an episode of Picket Fences, never caught a frame of Chicago Hope and didn’t even know The Practice existed.

Later, as America was settling in for its three decade-long love affair with Kelley, I was discovering Friends and ER, playing music in bands or passive smoking at a card table with seasoned euchre players.

A decade on, in 1997, I caught the opening episodes of Kelley’s Ally McBeal (1997-2002) and found it unwatchable.

The romantically obsessed McBeal was entirely too neurotic and frothy. The genre — was it drama or a comedy? — perplexed me. The program was too perky and saccharine, the characters improbably too fashion obsessed for my taste.

Sharp hasn’t always been Witherspoon’s biggest fan. Picture: Supplied

Did Kelly know nothing about young professional women my age?

As a consequence I was happy to give Kelley’s follow-up TV offerings, Boston Public and Boston Legal, a very wide berth.

You can imagine then my complete lack of interest in 2017 when I learned Kelley was behind HBO’s new short television series, Big Little Lies.

His attachment to the show was, for me, a categorical turn off. So too the project’s association with perennially sunny and preppy blonde Witherspoon.

The production had two seismic strikes against it before HBO delivered it.

It did, however, also have two things going for it — and they were both Australian.

The project had enticed Kidman back on to the small screen for the first time in decades and in a dual role that saw her step into a co-executive producer position — and in this new role she was fostering the career of Australian novelist Liane Moriarty.

Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, as mother-in-law to Kidman’s Celeste, is yet to give up her secret.

That, and curiosity, finally drew me in.

The first series, based entirely on Moriarty’s book of the same name, was half over by the time I sat down for my four-episode catch-up binge on Foxtel.

The central characters portrayed by Witherspoon and Laura Dern — as shrill domineering cartoonish high-maintenance mums Madeline and Renata, the scariest playground mums I’ve ever seen — initially pricked my every placid mothering instinct.

Then there was Kidman, as Celeste, playing a character that was alternately too still or too naked to fathom, unless you are a male viewer, in which case it likely doesn’t matter. I’m not sure all of Kidman’s nude scenes in season one were essential to the plot — but clearly after 30 years making television Kelley knows that if nothing else appeals to male viewers, this will.

In the background the less overt character of Jane, played by Shailene Woodley, was quietly growing on me while Zoe Kravitz, as Bonnie, was waiting for her moment to shine. In series two, now on air, she is finding it.

”...maybe Kelley’s best work — with some mature feminine instruction — is still ahead of him.”

So too is Kelley who, at 63, looks finally — and with Moriarty’s considerable assistance — to be creating complex conflicted female characters of depth.

With the exception of Witherspoon, the four other leads are icebergs with backstories, some dark, that reveal these characters to be infinitely more interesting than the season one plot line would have us believe.

Kelley has evolved as a writer in his relationship with Moriarty — and perhaps the eight others listed on the credits in executive producer roles.

Season two brings bigger richer performances from Dern — who, finally, is more than just a mere physical presence in the most recent episodes — Witherspoon and the fraying Kidman.

Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, as mother-in-law to Kidman’s Celeste, is yet to give up her secret but in prosthetic teeth and frumpy nanna guise (the only star in the ensemble to appear to have been utterly neglected by wardrobe — there’s no Roland Mouret or Louboutins here for Meryl), Streep makes short work of a character whose understated menace laced with befuddled elderly confusion holds us all hostage when she graces the screen.

With two closing episodes of Big Little Lies season two yet to come (on Foxtel), I find I am hopeful a third season will eventuate, for maybe Kelley’s best work — with some mature feminine instruction — is still ahead of him.

Twitter @InSharpRelief

Originally published as Season two of Big Little Lies seduces with a dark heart and Meryl’s prosthetic teeth