“Big Little Lies”: HBO Premieres A “Desperate Housewives” Take On A Hometown Murder

On Sunday, HBO will debut a new limited series based on a 2014 bestselling book byy Liane Moriarty. E! Online said “Big Little Lies,” which stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley, is a delicious and dark tale of a first-grade fundraiser gone awry due to a crime. Instead of Australia, the show will take place in Monterey, California.

Jane is portrayed by Woodley, Celeste is played by Kidman and Madeline is played by Witherspoon, who will all be caught up in the tangle of lies. HollywoodLife also said Renata Klein (played by Laura Dern) will be much more involved in the series as compared to the book, and will be a significant thorn in Jane’s life as a newbie in town.

The decision to switch the location of the show was not just purely out of aesthetics. Witherspoon told Variety, "That was a big, conscious choice. I think we all agreed that [Monterey] brought more of the sense of a small community where everybody talks about each other."

Lucy Mangan for the Guardian said fans of soapy melodramas will eat up “Big Little Lies,” and she knows why. She wrote, “t sets up all the cliches of female rivalry, maternal hypercompetitiveness and marital fidelity (or lack thereof) and then sets about investigating and deconstructing them, aided by the marquee cast giving, to a man and woman, probably career-best performances. The characters deepen so that, while it may still be clear that if people like this exist, we have indeed entered the endgame of late western capitalism, we no longer want to boot them through their plate-glass coastal windows and enjoy their crumpled bodies spoiling the expensive view. And if its examination of the after-effects of rape is underdone, its portrait of domestic violence – the unspoken compromises, the shifting power plays, the incremental, inexorable escalations, the pervasiveness of denial – is masterly.”