In the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights,
Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon) is
sitting down to dinner with her husband
and four kids in the meticulously decorated
dining room of her spacious home. Across
town, single mom Mia Warren (Kerry Wash-
ington) is also sitting down to a meal with
her daughter...at Lucky Palace, the Chinese
restaurant where she recently landed a
waitressing job. Mia and young Pearl (Lexi
Underwood) are new to the city, and they
don’t intend to stay long—certainly not long
enough for the smoke to clear.
Hulu’s eight-episode limited series Little
Fires Everywhere is based on Celeste Ng ’s
best-selling 2017 novel about a tight-knit
(and uptight) Midwestern community in
the ’90s and what two very different moms
bring out in each other. “They have this
commonality between them, which is that
they believe they’re doing what’s best for
their children,” says showrunner Liz Tige-
laar, who worked on the Apple TV+ series
The Morning Show that starred Wither-
spoon as an impulsive TV reporter.
“Through the story, that notion gets unrav-
eled in both of them. They each hold up a
mirror to the other, and the results change
their lives, the lives of their families, and the
lives of the people in the town.”Because, as the title suggests, this story ends with fire—or
rather, that’s where it starts. Both the book and the series open
with a house fire, one that seems to point to Elena’s problem
child, Izzy (Megan Stott), as the person holding the match. But
nothing ’s quite as it seems. Slowly, we get to know the rest of
Elena’s children—Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn), the overachiever with
a thing for cardigans, Trip (Jordan Elsass), the archetypal jock
who just needs to find the right girl to reveal his heart of gold, and
Moody (Gavin Lewis), the sensitive guy destined to live in the
friend zone. Then there’s Pearl Warren, the new girl, who finds
herself deeply entangled in the lives of all of the Richardsons. It’s
a story about the simplest of human interactions, and how those
interactions can provoke larger conversations about racism and
classism. That’s what made Ng ’s novel a success and why With-
erspoon selected it as the fourth pick in her book club.
“I met Celeste at a conference,” remembers Witherspoon.
“She stopped me and said, ‘I have a new book, and I really want
you to read it, and my dream is that you’ll turn it into a TV
show.’ I’m thinking, the likelihood of that happening is, like,
2 percent, because sometimes you can read a really great book
but it’s not cinematic.” But after reading Little Fires Every-
where, Witherspoon not only acquired the rights through her
production company, Hello Sunshine, but immediately
reached out to Kerry Washington because the two had been
looking to collaborate. “I fell in love with the book and could
immediately see [Reese] as Elena and me as Mia, and it just
started to come together,” says Washington, recently seen inRosemarie
DeWitt as Linda
McCulloughI38 APRIL 2020 EW●COMERIN SIMKIN/HULU (2)APRIL2020.LITTLEFIRES.LO.B.indd 38 FINAL 3/3/20 1:34 PM