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Review: ‘Big Little Lies’ Adjusts to Big Little Truths

Meryl Streep is as stellar as you would expect. But Season 2, while still sharp, feels more like a curtain call than a continuation.

From left, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern, in a scene from “Big Little Lies.” The so-called Monterey Five begin Season 2 trying to put to rest a corpse that won’t stay buried.Credit...Jennifer Clasen/HBO

We are living in a golden age of TV series that build to big finishes and then just … stick around.

“Barry” and “Killing Eve” continued what might have been stunning limited series with entertaining second seasons that nonetheless labored to spin out their premises. “The Handmaid’s Tale” moved beyond Margaret Atwood’s novel, first audaciously, then bludgeoningly, now tiringly. “13 Reasons Why” found reason to slog on. “The End of the ____ing World,” apparently, was just the beginning.

“Leave ’em wanting more” is not a concept familiar to television’s current business model. To watch TV these days can be like going to a movie, sitting through the credits and finding, not a surprise post-credits scene, but an entire additional film.

The latest seemingly concluded series to un-conclude itself is HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” arriving this Sunday. The first season seemed to finish as definitively as the death it ended on, and I was doubtful the show could be shocked back to life.

Here’s the good news: It worked a lot better than I feared. “Big Little Lies” continues to offer the sharp, dark-comedic observations that made the first season one of the great thrills of 2017.

What it does not offer, in the first three episodes, is an indisputable argument that there is material to power a second season, and maybe more, beyond the memory and repercussions of the first.

In that first, seemingly self-contained season, based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, the creator David E. Kelley used a murder investigation as a delivery device for an empathetic, class-conscious and acidly funny drama. Death was the hook for a story about parenting, marriage and the million species of guilt and judgment visited upon mothers in luminous, money-drenched Monterey, Calif.

The victim, so called, was Perry (Alexander Skarsgard), killed in a group melee with the series’s five central women, including his wife, Celeste (Nicole Kidman), whom he abused, and their neighbor Jane (Shailene Woodley), whom he raped. (Whether what happened was actually a “murder” is legally questionable, since it played out as an accidental killing in self-defense.)

Now, Perry is dead. But also he’s not. He remains present in flashbacks, in the confused mourning of Celeste’s two sons (and their increasingly aggressive acting-out), in the hold he still has on Celeste and in the guilt and pained memories of the friends, now known as the “Monterey Five,” who are keeping that night’s secret, especially Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz). He is a corpse that will not stay buried.

He is reanimated most directly, and his function as antagonist taken over by, his mother, Mary Louise (Meryl Streep). She has shown up to “help” Celeste — which is to say, to dispense sunshiny, catty judgment, undermine her at home, perform her grief loudly and drop suspicious questions about her sainted (to her) son’s passing.

Mary Louise is the worst and best thing about the early part of the season. In a series that stood out for seeing complications in even its least sympathetic characters, she is a straightforward nightmare: sanctimonious, moralizing, devious and rude to the point that it suggests a social disorder. “You’re very short,” she says upon meeting Madeline (Reese Witherspoon). “I don’t mean it in a negative way. Maybe I do. I find little people to be untrustworthy.”

Maybe Kelley (the season’s writer, with a story co-credit for Moriarty) will find layers in Mary Louise. For now, she seems at odds with the show’s philosophy that we are all the worst, at moments, but that’s not the sum of us. It’s a worldview personified richly, for instance, in the business mogul Renata (Laura Dern), whose bulldozer personality is founded on a deep fear of falling.

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Meryl Streep joined the ensemble for Season 2 as Mary Louise, a drab and terrifying mother in search of answers.Credit...Jennifer Clasen/HBO

On the other hand — well, did I mention that Mary Louise is played by Meryl Streep? Streep could play a parking meter and imbue it with human depth. Her passive-aggressive line readings and gestures (worrying a little gold crucifix on a chain as she passes judgment) are pristine. She’s drab and terrifying, a shark in a cardigan. In the first episode, she erupts from a meek smile into a shriek of grief, and that sound is the wail of every actress who will have to go up against her at the Emmys.

It’s ungrateful to wish that performance away. This is the spoiled princeling that TV in 2019 has made of me: I get movie-level production and a weekly stage turn by perhaps the finest actress of our age, surrounded by several of our other finest actresses, and I say, “Yeah, but …

But! It’s also possible to imagine a version of the series that continued without her. Kidman is remarkable, portraying Celeste in a kind of horror-story limbo, keeping Perry’s memory alive for her kids and, in a messy but believable way, for herself. (Her sessions with her therapist, a finely calibrated Robin Weigert, are as essential this season as last.)

After all, “Big Little Lies” is the sort of series, about people in a specific and well-imagined setting simply living life, that TV still needs more of. That kind of show could, theoretically, run for years, if not chained to, and defined by, its initial mystery hook.

You could see the fulcrum of this series being Witherspoon as the hard charging, indispensable Madeline. You could see it delving endlessly into this affluent community where the teachers work lectures on sustainable agriculture into a reading of “Charlotte’s Web” and parents treat teachers like servants. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the less-well-heeled Jane takes a job, a child asks the series’s core question about its sun-kissed dream town: “Why is it the prettier something is, the more dangerous?”

I could enjoy that series. Andrea Arnold, who takes over directing from Jean-Marc Vallée, retains its air of intimacy. Moment by moment, observation by observation, performance by performance, it is eminently watchable.

But for now, the show is driven mostly by the revelations and aftermaths of the first season’s explosions — not just the killing, but matters of infidelity and paternity — their unwinding and their gradual exposure.

“Big Little Lies” is evolving into “Big Little Truths,” and it’s unclear whether that will sustain a long-running story or just a well-made curtain call. The story of the Monterey Five, for now, is in the position of the Monterey Five themselves: trying to figure out whether it’s possible to let go and move on.

James Poniewozik is the chief television critic. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. He previously spent 16 years with Time magazine as a columnist and critic. More about James Poniewozik

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: For a Series, Death Shall Have No Dominion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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