Netflix’s American Son. Witherspoon then
found the perfect showrunner in Tigelaar,
whose “ideas for my [Morning Show] char-
acter always really jumped out to me,” the
actress says. “It was clear that she had really
incredible skills as a screenwriter.”
They agreed that Ng was right: Little Fires
was the kind of print story that would trans-
late to the screen, in part because Shaker
Heights is not your typical place. As Ng
writes in the book, the city has rules. It’s the
kind of wealthy community that puts a cur-
few on trick-or-treating and cites residentswhen their grass grows longer than six inches. It isn’t for every-
body, but it was made for Elena, the woman who keeps a color-
coordinated calendar to schedule her children’s events—one
color per child—measures her wine pours each night, and has sex
with her husband only on Saturdays. “I was really curious about
people who get stuck in a mindset or a socioeconomic bubble
and can’t see out of it,” Witherspoon says of the exacting role.
And that’s where Mia comes in: She’s going to pop that bubble.
Driving into town in her beat-up Chevy, Mia doesn’t come from a
world privileged enough to care about the length of its grass. She’s
an artist who works a day job to pay the bills. And, in the biggest
departure from the book (which never specified her race), Mia is
African-American. “It takes a story that’s about race and class that
involves the supporting characters [in the book] and puts the story
right between Kerry and Reese,” explains Tigelaar.
Things become more complicated when the pair find them-
selves on opposing sides of a court case. After Elena’s friends
the McCulloughs (Rosemarie DeWitt and Geoff Stults) struggle
to have children of their own, they adopt a Chinese girl. But
happiness is short-lived when they discover that the baby’s bio-
logical mother Bebe (Huang Lu)—who left the child at a
firehouse after she was born—wants her back. Elena defends
her friend’s right to raise the child, and Mia sides with Bebe.
“It’s a think piece,” says Witherspoon. “Do we value money
over biology?”
Bebe’s abandoment of her child isn’t her only hurdle: She’s also
an undocumented immigrant. “There are three different classes
represented. There’s the rich and the underserved, but there’s a
level underneath the underserved, which is not only not econom-
ically empowered but you are an immigrant so you are socially
devalued,” says Witherspoon. “Each one of them is whole and not
seen by the other and they are all parts of society that don’t rec-
ognize each other, and in this show they are forced to see that.”
Shot in 2019 in L.A., Little Fires attempts to answer the age-
old question of what makes a good parent and, in Elena’s case,
what happens when a less affluent mother and daughter try to
navigate a perfectly groomed town? “It’s about what you do
with new information,” says Witherspoon. “Do you soften to it,
or does it break you? Are you open to new ideas or does it so
rattle your worldview that you can’t hold on anymore?”
In other words, do you adapt or do you burn it all down?
As Elena and Mia will learn over the course of the series,
perhaps it doesn’t matter if your dinner is home-cooked or
takeout, served in fine stemware or plastic cups. The biggest
difference between the homes they’ve made is that only one of
them ends up in flames. �When telling a story about mother-
hood, racism, classism, and more,
Little Fires Everywhere showrunner
Liz Tigelaar knew the writers’ room of
the Hulu series needed to reflect the
players. “I wanted to have upper-level
writers who racially matched the land-
scape of the book,” she says about her
decision to hire six female scribes (out
of seven), four of whom are women of
color. “If the [story] has a white woman,
a black woman, an Asian woman, that
needed to be the composite of theupper levels of the room, because
we needed those voices.” When the
writers gathered in a Los Angeles con-
ference room last year to outline the
finale, they shared personal tales and
things their own children have done
in order to inspire stories—because
achieving diversity in the room wasn’t
just about race, it was also about
finding relevant life experience. “What
we ended up with was a majority of
mothers and one father,” says Tigelaar,
who is married with a son. “[Alongwith] the writers’ assistant, three of
us were adopted, three of us had been
in foster care, people had dealt with
surrogacy and infertility, two people
were from Ohio [where the story is
set], we had biracial marriages with
mixed-race children, artists and poets,
people who are first-generation with
immigrant parents, and all different
things. What started as us approaching
it through the lens of race ended up
being so much more than that in terms
of what diversity is.”“Izzy gravitates
toward Mia,”
Kerry Washington
(left) says of her
character’s
relationship with
the troubled teen
played by Megan
Stott (right)Fire
StartersA p e e k
inside the
w r i t e r s ’
roomEW ● COM APRIL 2020 39APRIL2020.LITTLEFIRES.LO.B.indd 39 FINAL 3/3/20 1:51 PM