TV: Little Fires Everywhere (2020)

This limited series was fantastic! I read Celeste Ng's well-written slow-peeled-onion story Everything You Never Told Me for a book club and was enthralled by her storytelling style and capability. I should have read Little Fires Everywhere, but I watched this first. 

Watching Little Fires Everywhere during this this period of racial unrest, it was especially apparent how on the surface, the issues that the main characters face have much to do with white privilege and conscious and unconscious bias. The script is full of judgmental and downright racist statements. But the beauty of this story, which you learn as the onion peels, is that in this case, its not simply about racial issues. Its about the house of cards the two main characters built for themselves.

Ep 1-3 I spent trying to decide who was worse: Mia or Elena? At the end of ep 3, Mia was in the lead for being unnecessarily secretive and vindictive, whereas Elena was just being a self-focused elitist racist. Her hate-ability was passive. Mia was actively hurting people.
By the end of ep 4, you get a sense that the composed Elena is coming unhinged, and there’s a feeling of familiarity to it: she’s done this before! What’s worse is that she has raised another little monster and propagated her self-focused elitist-ness! And while teenagers make dumb teenagery decisions, mini-Elena takes it to another level of threatening and de-valuing her so-called friends’ lives.
At the end of ep 6, the flashback episode, you come away with a good foundation for both Mia and Elena. Their lives of struggle and unhappiness were of their own construction. They both set up their lives so that the cards would fall and they would have to hurt someone in their future, namely their children.

The last two episodes for me was about redemption. 

I streamed this in September of 2020 with a limited pass to Hulu.