‘Big Little Lies’ Has Forgotten How to Make Its Women Talk Like Women

We’re only two episodes into Big Little Lies‘ second season, and already it has produced a plethora of quotable burns. But between Renata (Laura Dern) screaming that she will not NOT be rich and Mary Louise (Meryl Streep) ranting about her distrust of short people, lost in the shuffle is that Big Little Lies Season 2 has a problem writing its women.

It’s not that Big Little Lies isn’t composed of strong female characters. As was the case in Season 1, Madeline Martha Mackenzie (Reese Witherspoon), Celeste (Nicole Kidman), Jane (Shailene Woodley), Renata (Dern), and Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz) remain five of the best developed women on television. They have complicated backstories and desires completely unique to each of them. The Monterey Five felt like fully formed people when we first met them in 2017, and that’s continued throughout Season 2. Yet somehow along the way Big Little Lies has forgotten exactly how women talk to each other.

That’s a shame because pointedly passive aggressive swipes were what originally made Big Little Lies so addicting. In a season that revolved around a graphic murder and domestic abuse, one of the most heart-pounding plots involved Madeline inviting the first grade class to Disney on Ice on the same day as Renata’s daughter’s birthday. That moment captured how women interact better than almost anything else on television. Of course both Renata and Madeline were being supremely bitchy, Renata for refusing to invite Jane’s son Ziggy (Iain Armitage) to a birthday party full of all of his friends and Madeline for accepting tickets to an event she knew was on Amabella’s (Ivy George) birthday. But all of their calculated stabs were hidden under layers of generosity and perfect smiles. How could you fault Madeline for stealing attention from Amabella when she was being so generous with such expensive seats to such an expensive event? That was the deliciousness of Season 1. Though characters would routinely act in monstrous manners, it was always next to impossible to call them out.

Even when it was at its most dramatic Big Little Lies’ first season understood how women communicated, likely by drawing so heavily from Liane Moriarty’s stellar novel of the same name. Even the most brutally painful emotions were hidden by a calculated smile or a dismissive flick of the wrist. Entire episodes revolved around Jane, or more often Celeste feeling overwhelming amounts of insecurity, but choosing to hide their fear rather than risk any sort of confrontation. Deliberate, subtle, and complicated communication was so deeply embedded into the core of Season 1 that its finale revolved around this mode of talking. Jane never told Madeline or Celeste that Celeste’s husband Perry Wright (Alexander Skarsgård) was her rapist. She gave them one shocked, pointed look.

Somewhere over the past two years Big Little Lies has lost that nuance. This season’s most jarring moments are filled with bitter, direct confrontation. In the middle of “What Have They Done?” Jane gets wine with the most complicated woman in her life, Celeste. Jane and Celeste’s dynamic is almost too painful and powerful for words. They were both abused by the same man, the man who is now the father of their children. Jane was the other woman in Celeste’s life, but she is also one of Celeste’s closest friends, one of the few people who understands what it feels like to feel separate from your own life. Their relationship is loving and toxic, barbed and wholesome. And that complexity deserves more respect than Jane asking her friend, “Do you ever hate me? Just a little bit?”

Most women aren’t that confrontational about complex emotions, especially not when they’re talking to a friend as important as Celeste is to Jane. It’s not the regret Jane is experiencing that’s the problem; it’s the way she’s expressing it. Even saying, “I feel like you should hate me” would communicate her fear in a way that felt vulnerable rather than challenging. That’s how women who love each other argue — with vulnerability.

However, no character is as cringingly direct as Streep’s Mary Louise Wright. As unfailingly rich as it is to hear Mary Louise look Madeline in the eyes and say she doesn’t trust short people or accuse her daughter-in-law of being a terrible parent with one pointed question, Mary Louise always feels a bit too sharp and cruel for Monterey. In a community defined by doublespeak and compliments dripping in secretive insults, her upfront mannerisms feel distinctly masculine. Because she’s Meryl Streep she can play off that inconsistency as a grieving Queen Bee who has lost her edge. But only because she’s Meryl Streep.

Part of the reason it sounds like Big Little Lies‘ second season hasn’t been written by women is because… It wasn’t. Not entirely. According to IMDB, there are only three credited writers for Big Little Lies: David E. Kelley, Matthew Tinker, and Liane Moriarty. Though she has a “story by” credit for all episodes this season, it’s difficult to know how involved Moriarty has been this season on a line-by-line level. It feels odd to assume that an author who has proven themselves to be so deft at understanding the unique way women communicate would inexplicably allow such clunky and direct lines. It seems far more likely the problem lies with the writer who’s credited with creating the teleplay of every episode this season, Kelley.

To be clear, Kelley also wrote every episode of Big Little Lies Season 1, and is well known for his treatment of female characters on screen (see Ally McBeal, among others). But Season 1 was pulling dialogue and plot from Moriarty’s book; Season 2 is not.

And there are moments of gracious subtly to counter Big Little Lies’ newfound directness. Ever since she first appeared in 1999’s Election, Witherspoon has been a pro at reshaping too severe writing into something one of her hyper-feminine characters would actually say. Madeline cheerily spits out her scathing insults with a smile, turning them into catastrophic projectiles. She was a force to be reckoned with in Season 1 and that’s only become more true with Streep’s Mary Louise as her primary foe.

Likewise giving Dern’s Renata an expanded role has been nothing but brilliant. She should have already received a truckload of Emmys for Episode 1 when Renata told her friends that Detective Adrienne Quinlan (Merrin Dungey) is into women. While spilling her “gossip for another day,” Renata is theoretically trying to comfort her friends by telling them they won’t be arrested for murder. But even while she’s passing along this vital information she’s also flexing, name dropping a casual executive friend and targeting the wealthy Celeste with her gossip while temporarily ignoring the less well-off Jane and Madeline. Even when she’s on their side, Renata is still bitchy and a tad bit manipulative.

More often than not moments like Madeline’s refreshing smugness or Renata’s dismissiveness seem to emerge in spite of this season’s too-direct dialogue, not because of it. Big Little Lies is still wonderful. The Monterey Five are still some of the most delightful women to grace television. But this time around Big Little Lies has lost a bit of what made it such a powerhouse two years ago — its unapologetically feminine voice.

New episodes of Big Little Lies premiere on HBO Sundays at 9/8c.

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