When the Cliffhanger Takes Its Sweet Time
“Somebody’s Dead.” That’s the title of the first episode of Big Little Lies, the limited series, starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley, currently running on Sunday evenings on HBO. The title, for a show that is exceptionally subtle—especially in its depiction of the dramas and mundanities that shape its central women’s lives—is exceptionally unsubtle. But it’s also appropriate: Somebody, on this show, is dead. Somebody has been, indeed, murrrrrrdered. And we won’t find out who—and whodunnit—until, it seems, the very last episode of the series’s seven-episode run.
isn’t alone in posing a pivotal question at its outset and then waiting a long—a teasingly, tantalizingly long—time before revealing, the teen drama nearing the end of its first season on the CW, also uses its first episode to set up a murder mystery that will remain mysterious long after that episode concludes, thus ensuring that the soaptastic show features, underneath it all, some simmering moral tension. , the that just concluded its six-episode arc, teased several different theories, from the mundane to the tragic, as to why Simmons has disappeared from public life.” , the mega-popular NBC family drama, recently wrapped up its first season not by answering the question it had heavily hinted it would answer, in its season finale—how one key character comes to die—but instead by pivoting to answer other ones.
