Little Fires Everywhere Review (Spoiler-Free)

Elena is a woman who believes in rules, and the idea that following them is the surest and safest path to success. It’s why she’s so initially thrown by the arrival of newcomer Mia Warren (Washington) and her daughter Pearl, and the fact that their presence shakes up the picturesque planned community in which she lives. Mia is an itinerant artist, who travels the country with most of the family’s possessions in a beat-up hatchback. Elena initially catches sight of the Warrens sleeping in their car and reports them as homeless, the first of many instances in Little Fires Everywhere that slyly interrogate our assumptions about race, class and privilege. 

Washington’s Mia is a prickly, talented photographer and mixed media artist who has built her entire world around her daughter, Pearl, and the idea that her life is her own to command. A carefree, nonconformist type, she’s not interested in things like a lease that lasts longer than a month or a sexual relationship that comes with strings. In true 1990s fashion, you know that Mia is a rebel because she wears Velvet Underground t-shirts and gets high while she does metalwork or lights photographs on fire in the name of her art. 

Both these women would likely be caricatures in the hands of lesser actresses, but Witherspoon and Washington sizzle together and, as a result, it’s easy to see how Mia and Elena both reflect and repulse one another. Elena offers Mia and Pearl a place to live – and charitably discounted rent – in the house her parents left her, as well as a job as a housekeeper in her own home. This is a role which she is quick to rebrand as a sort of “house manager,” because even she realizes how terrible the optics on all that are, but its general duties involve cooking and cleaning for the all-white Richardson clan. (It’s the 90s I realize, but whew.)

The two women’s lives become increasingly intertwined as Pearl develops relationships with several of the Richardson children, and Mia herself becomes part of Shaker Heights life. One of the most interesting things that Little Fires Everywheredoes in its initial episodes is position Mia as someone straddling the line between inclusion and exclusion. Her skin color and social status immediately set her apart from everyone in Elena’s orbit, but the show is careful to simultaneously underline how alike these two women are despite this fact. A pitch perfect drunken bonding session over a bottle of wine early in the show’s first hours shows us so clearly how, in a different world, these two could have been real friends. 

Instead, each becomes something of an uncomfortable mirror for the other, reflecting back the things they’ve failed to give their own children – and themselves. Pearl, it turns out, is drawn to the stability and ease of the Richardson home, where the everyday choices of living are easy and there’s always another spot at the dinner table, a spare set of nightclothes, an extra bike. Youngest Richardson daughter Izzy is drawn to the unconventional nature of Mia, a mother who doesn’t ask her to be something she’s not and who encourages her to embrace her true self, no matter what that means. (In a welcome shift, this limited series addresses Izzy’s sexuality in a way that the novel does not.)