Stars align for the anticipated return of TV’s biggest little show

Big Little Lies, one of the great successes of the new era of big-star, big-budget television, returns for season two.

Season two of Big Little Lies returns with Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley.

It was one of the most critically acclaimed shows of this new era of television, an era of feverish commissioning and massive budgets.

And it provided a sophisticated vehicle for a group of famous actresses, wonderfully illustrating the increasing blurring of boundaries between TV and film.

Next Monday, the much anticipated and in no way disappointing Big Little Lies returns from HBO for a second season with Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Zoe Kravitz and Shailene Woodley.

The new season features even more star casting with Meryl Streep as the grieving mother of Alexander Skarsgard’s character Perry Wright, whose death at the bottom of an outside staircase was at the centre of the first season. That was not so much a tragic event, really, given the damage he had caused and the secrets he had forced those around him to keep.

Streep, who joined the cast without reading a script, thought the first season “was the greatest thing on TV”. She is Mary Louise, a serenely obdurate woman determined to protect her dead son while he’s gone, come to glamorous coastal Monterey for answers. Instead she finds a group of women slowly unravelling in the wake of his death, all in their different ways reliving it and dealing with the lies surrounding it.

The new season digs into the aftermath of Perry’s death at local school Otter Bay’s trivia night. The death took place after Kravitz’s Bonnie, the serene, earthmother yoga instructor with an annoying sense of equanimity, saw him getting aggressive with Kidman’s Celeste. Celeste and Bonnie in particular are wrestling with what just happened and the lie they’ve all told about it, but they’re not the only ones.

It’s obvious, as the new season starts, that this lie will be mined for all its malignancy. And it has already started to result in more fissures in the friendships between the women, some of their mar­riages and some of their individual psyches.

Meryl Streep joins the cast for season two.

David E. Kelley wrote all seven episodes for the new season. Kelley, who was nominated for an Emmy for the first season of Big Little Lies and won one as executive producer on the then limited series, wrote the new season from a novella from Liane Moriarty, the writer of the original novel on which the series is based. Again he explores the unlovely places of blended families, infidelity, the continuing repercussions of divorce, domestic violence, the maliciousness of gossip and competitiveness among women, and the way friends can turn lethally on each other.

And once more he gives us a scintillating drama, lit with dashes of his quirky, absurdist, often screwball humour, all told, like the novel, from multiple perspectives. It’s a kind of hall-of-mirrors storytelling style, nicely controlled by new director Andrea Arnold, who directs all seven episodes, taking over from Jean-Marc Vallee, who directed the first season, where the evolving narrative is reflected in the filmmaking process.

Scenes sometimes seem to overlap slightly, merging for moments, bringing meaning from one to another, beguilingly shot by cinematographer Jim Frohna with his gift for intimate naturalism. Not so much a murder mystery as an intense study of character, the series develops the subtext of its multiple interconnecting stories in a way that a conventional 120-minute movie often is unable to do in such exquisite detail. And it’s that detail that engrosses in this stunning display of human folly and cruelty.

Big Little Lies screens on Foxtel from next Monday.