Note: This post discusses plot details from both seasons of “Big Little Lies.”
After the caution tape unraveled, one of the show’s biggest pitfalls came into unsettling focus: Bonnie, the show’s most visible black woman (and one of few women of color in Monterey), had been given its heaviest burden. The pivotal finale scene underscored how little we knew about Bonnie, a beautiful yoga instructor who had been introduced through her connection to a more central character: Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), the first wife of Bonnie’s husband, Nathan (James Tupper).
After HBO announced that BLL would get a second season, fans hoped the show would make sincere efforts to flesh out Bonnie’s backstory. To that end, Season 2 introduced Bonnie’s parents (Crystal Fox and Martin Donovan) and borrowed from its source material (Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel) to tell us what motivated Bonnie to defend Celeste so forcefully: Bonnie had been abused by her mother as a child. But the show never meaningfully addressed the biggest elephant in the room: how Bonnie’s life as a biracial woman might impact her experiences in wealthy, predominantly white Monterey.
“Big Little Lies” was never supposed to have a second season and, as many have pointed out, the drama’s occasionally riveting return lacked the focus of its stellar first outing. Bonnie is the biggest casualty of that discord — she spends the newest season miserable and struggling to reconcile her role in Perry’s death. The sudden arrival of her mother (whom Bonnie’s husband contacts out of concern) merely compounds her pain. The show’s haphazard handling of Bonnie’s story is an example of what can happen when TV shows treat race as an afterthought, as opposed to an inherent and inextricable part of a character’s experience.
Throughout Season 2′s seven episodes, “Big Little Lies” hinted, precariously, that Bonnie’s life could be in danger. While the show thankfully did not resort to the most insidious tropes involving underrepresented characters, Bonnie’s story took a particularly frustrating turn in the finale, as she decided to tell the police she pushed Perry to his death. In essence, Bonnie continued to carry the burden of a decision she didn’t directly make: to tell the police, at Madeline’s direction, that Perry’s fall was an accident.
That the other women in the Monterey Five showed up to support her at the police station feels self-congratulatory at best and tone deaf at worst. The elephant is back: Bonnie was the one who pushed Perry, and it’s hard to believe the white women — who have at turns questioned Bonnie’s crisis of conscience — will face similar repercussions over his death.
The show failed Bonnie in other ways. Her mother, Elizabeth, was sketched in stereotype: a mystical black woman who had visions, practiced a voodoo-esque form of healing (with no explorations of her family origin to fill in the blanks) and reduced her daughter’s fragile mental state to “mopey-dope.” (Our understanding of Bonnie’s relationship with her father is informed only by a roughly one-minute scene in which Bonnie confronts him over his failure to protect her from her mother’s wrath. His loyalty to his daughter’s abuser is equally confounding.) Elizabeth, at least, makes the pointed observation that no one in Monterey looks like her daughter — “I haven’t seen one other black person since I got here,” she tells Bonnie — but she is soon felled by a sudden, possibly vision-induced stroke. With the exception of a few scenes, Elizabeth spends the remainder of the season in a coma.
The root of the violence Bonnie endured at the hands of her mother is never quite explained — is it fueled by mental-health issues, temper, resentment? — though it’s suggested that Elizabeth is an alcoholic, making it all the more puzzling when Bonnie asks Nathan to bring wine to the hospital to celebrate her mother’s short-lived recovery.
While Kravitz has gone to emotional depths to portray the complexities of matrilineal trauma, her talented performance is stunted by lackluster writing. The show doesn’t explain something as basic as the significance behind “Shake Sugaree,” Elizabeth Cotten’s oft-covered folk song, which Elizabeth and Bonnie sing to Bonnie’s daughter Skye. And when Bonnie and Elizabeth reach a point of reconciliation, shortly before Elizabeth’s death, the show seems to present the moment as a victory — the turning point that leads Bonnie to confess that she is not in love with her husband. But without a deeper backstory, it feels like defeat.
Some of the show’s missteps are storytelling issues; others point to an apparent lack of diversity (and, perhaps, alleged creative turmoil) behind the scenes. Similar issues have undermined, to varying degrees, otherwise smart storytelling in shows such as “The Bold Type,” “Unreal,” “Nashville” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Like Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel, “Big Little Lies” appears to have put little thought beyond its colorblind casting (Bonnie was not black in Moriarty’s book), and it’s to the show’s detriment.
It’s a particularly striking flaw in Season 2 because of how much influence Bonnie’s actions have on the drama’s other characters. “If Bonnie were just an underwritten character who remained on the sidelines, that would be one thing,” Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién observed following the show’s first season. “But knowing that she would kill Perry in the end should have galvanized the filmmakers to flesh out her character, in order to provide greater depth to the choices that led up to this moment.”
Season 2 seems to have done even more damage by tepidly acknowledging Bonnie’s background but failing to explore it in any meaningful way.
