Review: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Ignites Over Race and Class

Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington play moms divided by nearly everything in the Hulu mini-series. The Hulu mini-series “Little Fires Everywhere” is set in the 1990s, a fact that its script and soundtrack take great pains to remind you of: Sugar Ray and Grey Poupon, “Waterfalls” and “Before Sunrise. ” There’s even a reasonable onscreen facsimile of the New York Times lobby circa 1997. Watching it, though — three of its eight episodes appear Wednesday, followed by one each week — you’ll most likely be reminded of a more recent vocabulary.

You can almost sense the characters catching themselves just before they refer to one another’s appropriations, microaggressions and code switching. Rarely has a period piece felt this assiduously up-to-date in its racial and gender politics. Based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling 2017 novel, “Little Fires Everywhere” originated with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine. And like another Hello Sunshine project, HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” it adapts a literary page-turner by a female author into a starring vehicle for Witherspoon.

More pertinently, it also resembles “Big Little Lies” in the way it evokes the tradition of the Hollywood — you’ll excuse the term — “women’s picture,” movies mostly made by men (Douglas Sirk, George Cukor, William Wyler) that accommodated female stars and domestic situations by wrapping them in sometimes high-pitched melodrama. And while “Little Fires,” developed by Liz Tigelaar (“Brothers and Sisters,” “Casual”), is staged and edited at a calm, even deliberate, pace, with a variety of melancholy cover versions of peppier ’90s songs, there’s no way to get around the melodramatic core of the material. (Seven episodes were available for review. ) Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four and lawyer’s wife in the ur-suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

She also works part-time at the local newspaper — her dreams of a big-city career were scuttled by motherhood — and manages a family rental property, which is how she meets Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), an art photographer, and Mia’s teenage daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood). Mia and Pearl are constantly on the move, migrating in their beat-up car from city to city, a lifestyle that Mia attributes to her art practice and that the even-tempered, precociously intelligent Pearl grimly tolerates. When they rent Elena’s apartment, a spark is struck — something in Mia and Pearl’s uncompromising bohemianism resonates with Elena’s submerged desire for a different life — and the do-gooder Elena impulsively offers Mia a job as “house manager” for her family, which really means cooking and cleaning.