Television series

Big Little Lies

Name: Big Little Lies
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Mystery
Released: 2017
Cast: James Tupper, Shailene Woodley, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Zoë Kravitz

Big Little Lies wraps a murder mystery around a study of privilege, motherhood and quiet cruelty in a wealthy beach town. It's gorgeous, funny, and increasingly devastating — three women's friendship forms under the weight of secrets none of them can say aloud. Watch it for the ensemble alone: Witherspoon, Kidman and Woodley at their sharpest, playing comedy and trauma in the same breath.

TVMaze rating

7.8

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Reese Witherspoon again plays a controlling suburban mother whose tidy world collides with a woman she can't control, this time with class and race tearing at the seams instead of murder.

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Nicole Kidman again glides through Manhattan wealth while a marriage's foundations crack open after a shocking crime — same glossy dread, same slow-motion unravelling of a golden life.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Same premise stripped of gloss: an ensemble of women in a small coastal town, each quietly at war with her own disappointment and cruelty. Frances McDormand plays the discontent Monterey moms only hint at, without a single murder to solve.

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A child's death cracks open every secret in a small English coastal town, showing how grief and suspicion spread through a tight community — the procedural, slower-burn cousin to Big Little Lies' mystery.

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A two-hour dose of the same nerve — the perfect marriage as performance, hiding contempt and violence underneath — sharper, colder and more cynical about what husbands and wives owe each other.

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Big Little Lies is often called Peyton Place's glossy grandchild — this is the original, the mid-century bestseller-turned-film about a New England mill town where affairs, class resentment and hidden violence simmer beneath church socials and school pageants.

It's startling how contemporary the scandal feels — the same architecture of secrets, gossip and quiet female rage that Big Little Lies perfected decades later, just with 1950s restraint standing in for HBO nudity.

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