The thing about the ocean is that it may look beautiful and calm at first glance, but you can never fully know what might be lurking beneath the surface. It could be turtles swimming languidly or sharks devouring their prey. “What do you look at in the ocean? What’s out there?” a young girl asks Reese Witherspoon’s character in the new teaser for HBO’s new miniseries Big Little Lies. Her response is just as vague as the teaser itself is: “It’s full of life, dreams, mystery…” Where the 60 second long trailer lacks in plot points, it makes up for it in heavy oceanic imagery.
Big Little Lies is adapted from Laine Moriarty’s novel of the same name that centers on three mothers whose children all attend the same school who all become close friends as their complicated and seemingly idyllic personal lives begin to unravel when dangerous challenges present themselves. Steamy bedroom scenes and thrilling suspense are juxtaposed with thoughtful questions about the vastness of the ocean. The teaser promises an intimate and darkly humorous look into these women’s lives without taking itself too seriously. There are notes of David Fincher’s Gone Girl mixed in with a tone similar to The Girl on the Train, though hopefully it follows through better than the movie version did.
The seven episode miniseries will premiere sometime in 2017 and has one of the best casts of any golden-age television show: the aforementioned Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgard, Adam Scott, and Zoe Kravitz. It reunites director Jean-Marc Vallee with Reese Witherspoon who starred in his 2014 film Wild, which she totally owned in. Vallee is extremely talented when it comes to personal, single character driven projects like Dallas Buyers Club, The Young Victoria, and Wild. Giving him the space of seven episodes to fully explore the all the secrets of these women will surely make Big Little Lies one of the most interesting things on television next year.
This cast and director only continues the trend of auteur filmmakers and A-list actors turning away from the big screen to dip their toes into the golden age of television. The past few years, television has welcomed the likes of Matthew McConaughey, Rachel McAdams, Viola Davis, Kevin Spacey, Halle Berry, Billy Murray, etc. with open arms. Top directors have moved away from film and have begun to experiment with television, too. Steven Soderbergh famously announced a few years ago that he was retiring from movie directing, but has yet kept very busy with various television projects. Woody Allen recently made the leap with Crisis in Six Scenes on Amazon and actually hated it.
While the series has no set premiere date apart from 2017, it might be a good guess that either this or season three of The Leftovers will take the slot that Game of Thrones has left vacated. Explore the depths of the teaser below and keep on the lookout for any new updates.
