Entertainment
HBO’s ‘Big Little Lies’ Season 3 Still Faces a Major Problem, Even With a Sequel Book
The pending third season of HBO‘s prestige drama, Big Little Lies, feels slightly more imminent, with a new sequel book by author Liane Moriarty releasing this summer. Hitting shelves on August 25th, Big Little Truths will be the second installment in the series, and Moriarty’s first-ever sequel. The book picks up with the Monterey Five a decade after the events of the original novel, and will serve as the source material for Season 3. Like its predecessor, Big Little Truth’s premise is anchored in fraught family dynamics. With their children now in the throes of teenagehood, the tightly bonded group of moms is facing enough drama at home, but when an inquisitive stranger begins lurking around the high school and the principal receives a severed human finger in the mail, buried secrets and long-avoided truths are bound to be exhumed.
One of HBO’s most star-studded series, Big Little Lies has been inching toward its third season in piecemeal fashion for over five years, with rare in-development updates keeping fans hypervigilant, but largely in the dark about the who, what, and when of the project. At least part of the reason for the stalled progress can be attributed to HBO waiting for Moriarty to complete the second novel before moving forward in earnest. Moriarty previously wrote an unpublished novella to lay the groundwork for Season 2 of Big Little Lies, which affirms the key role the author continues to play in ideating where the series goes next.
‘Big Little Lies’ is a Perfect Example of Book-to-Screen Cross-Pollination
Big Little Lies has developed a rather rare and amicable relationship with its source material in two seasons. Season 1 was, on the whole, well-received as a faithful screen adaptation. There are some discrepancies, to be sure. For instance, the book is set in a fictional coastal town in Australia, while the show is memorably set in Monterey, California. The show also adds in affair plots that were not in Moriarty’s story. In the book, Madeline Mackenzie (Reese Witherspoon) never has a workplace tryst with the community theater director, Joseph Bachman (Santiago Cabrera). Certainly, all the marriages depicted in the show are tottering or dicey, turning up the dial on domestic turmoil.
For Season 2, Liane Moriarty moved into an executive producer role for Big Little Lies, which brought her closer to the creative mapping of the drama series that was then operating largely off-book. The author’s unpublished novella work launched the captivating character Mary Louise Wright (Meryl Streep), mother of Perry Wright (Alexander Skarsgård). Mary Louise was unabashedly written with Streep in mind, handing HBO a new female lead crafted around an actor who would further elevate the series’ already first-rate casting. The pivotal introduction of the formidable mother-in-law undeniably shaped the trajectory of Season 2, which focused on the aftermath of Perry’s death and Celeste’s fight to keep custody of her two boys.
Since 2019, the Big Little Lies creative exchange has, too, begun moving in the opposite direction. Most notably, Laura Dern‘s Emmy-winning portrayal of Renata Klein inspired Moriarty to give the character a larger role in Big Little Truths. Dern made Renata such a remarkable force and fan-favorite on screen that the book sequel had to match her energy moving forward. Big Little Truths, therefore, is not simply returning to the same character contours the author left off with in 2014. Moriarty is now writing within a terrain that has been positively shaped by the choices HBO made with her characters. In other words, the TV adaptation is now influencing the author’s creative process, not just vice versa.
Replacing Director Jean-Marc Vallée May Be Season 3’s Biggest Challenge
With the publication of Big Little Truths, the biggest outstanding issue now facing the successful continuation of the TV show is not a matter of source material, but the fact that creative control is up for grabs. The death of Season 1 director Jean-Marc Vallée in 2021 was a significant loss for HBO. Vallée, who also directed HBO’s masterful limited series, Sharp Objects, had an unparalleled eye for infusing a character’s memories and traumas into intricately layered visual storytelling. Zoë Kravitz praised Vallée as the visionary behind the show back in 2022, echoing the heartbreaking challenge of moving forward into a third season without him.
Even though Season 2 of Big Little Lies brought in a different director, Andrea Arnold, to direct all seven episodes, Vallée’s influence on the finished product was of paramount importance, so much so that some behind-the-scenes controversy ensued. Arnold spoke out in 2019 about losing creative control in post-production as Vallée stepped in to substantially re-edit her footage. Seemingly, this was always the plan by showrunner, David E. Kelley, who didn’t want to change the visual tone and identity established by Vallée in Season 1. Unfortunately, the creative team got their wires crossed, with Arnold being widely misled about the extent to which she could exact her own vision for the show.
Clearly, the legacy of Jean-Marc Vallée looms large over Season 3 of Big Little Lies. Whoever takes up the directorial reins will have to strike a delicate balance. Simply imitating the first-season aesthetic is no longer an option, nor is a huge tonal shift that makes the new season feel too divergent from the series that audiences originally connected with. That is to say, Big Little Lies’ reinvention crossroads after a substantial hiatus must avoid the Euphoria trajectory, in which a third-season stylistic pivot loses touch with the show’s original spark.
Altogether, the release of Big Little Truths is a key milestone on the (long) road to Season 3 that will, at the very least, allow fans a much-needed sneak peek into the potential plot arcs, new characters, and creative possibilities surrounding the Monterey Five. The 10-year time jump gives Season 3 plenty of room to evolve, but also raises the stakes for whoever takes the director’s chair. The pitfalls of television time jumps are many, including pacing issues, recasting, and exposition dumping, but Big Little Lies does have a unique advantage for continuity: Liane Moriarty has already done much of the heavy lifting in terms of character development through Big Little Truths. Accordingly,thislong-awaited sequel may finally kickstart Season 3’s production in the latter half of this year, while still reminding us, above all, that good things take time.
- Release Date
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2017 – 2026-00-00
- Network
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HBO
- Directors
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Jean-Marc Vallee, Andrea Arnold
- Writers
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T. Rafael Cimino
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