We're Finally Going Back To Monterey! The Third Season of Big Little Lies Is Finally Happening

 

It's been awhile since I officially wrote about it but those of you who are constant readers of my work on television know that from roughly 2019 until at least 2022,  I was always arguing that there needed to be another season of Big Little Lies one of the greatest limited series of all time that got renewed for a second season – and may have inadvertently started the trend of limited series becoming real TV shows when it was renewed for a second season which didn't receive the same raves but that I put on my top ten list of 2019 anyway.

I suspect some of my readers might have considered this is a running gag with so many of the columns: every time any one of the incredible female talents in that show has done anything in the 2020s I often commented that it was something they were doing while waiting for Season 3 to be greenlit. That said while hope does spring eternal I eventually didn't think it was going to happen for many reasons. One of them, sadly, was the passing of Jean Claude-Vallee the director of Season 1 in 2022, which seemed to bring the curtain down. The other thing was that for not just the female leads but really the entire cast, they've been pretty damn busy the last decade.

Nicole Kidman by far has been the busiest of the performers. After Season 2 ended she became a collaborator with creator David E. Kelley. In 2020 they collaborated on the extraordinary The Undoing on HBO and the following year she took the female lead of another Kelley adaptation of a Lianne Moriarity work Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu. That was renewed for a second season which finally aired this past May. By the time it did Kidman had already appeared in the second season of Lioness for Paramount Plus (for which she received a Critics Choice nomination) and had played the lead role in another adaptation of a novel on Netflix The Perfect Couple. By the time this show premiered I remember reading satirical articles that if Nicole Kidman appeared in a small coastal town you know someone was going to be murdered. It was one of the funniest articles I read because it seemed to be a certain on TV in the 2020s.

Reese Witherspoon moved to Apple with another brilliant actress Jennifer Aniston where they starred in The Morning Show which during the past decade has become one of the more nominated and awarded shows on TV. Witherspoon has to date received two Outstanding Actress in A Drama nomination for her work and Season 4 is scheduled to debut later this month. Laura Dern is also about to return to television in another Emmy nominated series this fall, only this one is a satirical farce: Palm Royale. She wasn't nominated for an Emmy for her work but once again she was working with an extraordinary female cast, from Kristin Wiig and Alison Janney to the remarkable Carol Burnett. The show received fifteen nominations last year and I'm eagerly looking forward to Season 2.

The two other members of the Monterey Five haven't been quite as busy in television as their co-stars though that has been changing this past year. Shailene Woodley had mostly been working in movies and one of the series she starred in Three Women was filmed for Showtime but was cancelled before it aired. Starz TV rescued it and it was another work of subtle brilliance. She's scheduled to appear in the Emmy nomination Paradise in Season 2, though we are still unaware of the role. She's scheduled to play Patricia Highsmith and Janis Joplin down the road. Zoe Kravitz starred in the Hulu reimagining of High Fidelity but it got canceled after one season. She then took over the role of Selina Kyle in the most recent Batman film. This past year she received her first Emmy nomination for playing…Zoe Kravitz in The Studio. To be fair, she played a snide Zoe at the Golden Globes, Zoe on mushrooms at the worst possible time, then played a perfect version of herself at a movie preview before peeing herself when it was over. Obviously it was her most unbelievable role to date.

The rest of the cast has been very busy doing other things and getting more recognition for it then they did from the Emmys at the time. Adam Scott, who played Madeline's husband, went from there to working at Lumon and has recently received his second consecutive Emmy nomination for Drama for Severance, still the favorite to win the grand prize this Sunday. He also played himself in The Studio and was nominated for his work there, though he lost to his co-nominee Bryan Cranston. (I guess Sal Saperstein wasn't enough help.) Iain Armitage, who played young Ziggy has been busy playing Young Sheldon for the last six years and getting his share of critical acclaim (though no Emmy nominations) for it. And Meryl Streep has spent the last two years on Only Murders in the Building in the most challenging role of her career – a failed actress. Naturally she received an Emmy nomination for it as well as a Critics Choice Award. She has since been a regular for the last two seasons.

All of this is just to say while I would hear talk every six months or so about their being a third season of Big Little Lies the more time went by I chose to dismiss it as just that, talk. How could you get five of these incredible talents back in one place considering how packed their schedules were, never mind everyone else? And David E. Kelley, when he's not writing for Kidman, has been busier than ever these days. Just last year he co-wrote and produced an adaptation of Presumed Innocent and he has at least two more projects in development one, naturally, with Nicole Kidman as the lead.

To be sure there was increased chatter about it the closer we got to the end of 2024, which perhaps for obvious reasons I chose to cling too. This time it was coming from Witherspoon and Kelley themselves which actually meant something this time but I still didn't take it seriously and I sure as hell wasn't going to write about. Even when it was more or less made clear at imdb.com itself that a third season was planned, I just didn't want to buy it.

Because as a devoted fan of HBO dramas I'd been down this road. When Deadwood was prematurely cancelled after its third season David Milch promised us we would get two TV movies to wrap it all up. Fans like me clung to that idea but by 2008 the set had been torn down and most of the cast had moved on to other projects, many of which were far more successful that Deadwood had been, at least when it came to ratings. Now as any fan of television knows we GOT that movie to wrap it all up in the 2018 thirteen years later. It had already been five years by that point and even in an era with long gaps between seasons I didn't think it would happen.

And then miracles, we have finally gotten the word from on high. We received the official notification from Shailene Woodley yesterday morning a day I needed good news more than usual. More to the point it's now clear the other pieces are in place and that's the writing.

Lianne Moriarty, as fans know, helped Kelley co-write the second season of Lies, so it was always dependent on her coming up with more of the story. Moriarity has been busy herself the last decade turning out novels at a regular pace and getting more than a view adapted into limited series. Last year Peacock did an adaptation of Apples Will Fall and earlier this year The Last Anniversary was adapted for Australian TV – the first adaptation of her work done in her native land. This year it was announced that she has a sequel planned and it will come out sometime in 2026.

To be clear how much that would have in common with the new season was always going to be an open question. Both Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples Never Fall were significantly different when adapted to American TV then in their original books as I've written about in my own column over the years. (I actually argued that all of the writers who did so either improved the work or creating visions that one could read the source material and enjoy both for what they stand for.) And it's not like Kelley has a habit of staying faithful to the source material if it suits him; when he turned Jean Haniff Korelitz's You Should Have Known into The Undoing, he took what was essentially a character piece and tried to change it into a whodunit. That the adaptation worked at all was do to the power of the performances more than the writing: in order to enjoy it Kidman had to play someone who was hopeless naïve.

I suspect the sequel will be more for Moriarity's fans then those who expect to learn more about the Monterey Five have been up to. What matters more is if a showrunner had been assigned and last night we officially got a greenlight for who that was. Francesca Sloane, whose work as the head writer for Donald Glover's reboot of Mr. and Mrs. Smith may have completely reclaimed a film only known for Brangelina's coming into existence into an extraordinary dark mashup of genres.

I suppose this is where I could take a victory lap of sorts for assuming that a third season was possible even after so many though the story was over after the end of Season 2. I admit that while I gave up hope there would be a third season of the show, I never doubted as to why I thought there could and should be one. Here I'll actually quote myself in the last 'official' article I wrote about it in 2022:

The thing is I still believe there are still stories to be told about these women. Perhaps they could be told after whatever punishment Bonnie ends up facing for her crimes. (For those who didn’t read the book, Bonnie does eventually do what we see in the series and faces minimal punishment and sentence; given the circumstances of the crime, it’s likely that would happen in real life as well.) Perhaps the story could tell us what is like for Bonnie when she leaves prison and has the face the community after her sentence. Perhaps we could see what the stigma around the Monterey Five, just whispers before, happen once a society that buries its truths has to face the fact some of their most prominent citizens were a part of it.

What would the marriage of Madeline and Ed be like now that he knows the truth about the biggest lie of all? What is the fate of Renata, now bankrupt and on the verge of leaving her husband? What stigmas will surround Jane when it becomes public that a member of the community raped her? What stigmas will surround Celeste now that she’s known as being part of an abused marriage? And how will all of these children – who spent much of the first season as proxies for the wars their mothers were waging – deal with these problems as they grow old enough to understand them?

 

Now it seems that the viewer may very well learn about these stories. It's not as though Moriarity hasn't been gifted in telling them in most of her work; as someone who devoured every novel she wrote after I saw  Lies, even the ones that haven't been (yet) adapted for television are brilliant at dealing with women and families dealing with trauma years after the fact. And she's usually gifted at telling stories about teenagers and adolescents. Big Little Lies was actually something of an aberration as all of the children were in first and second grade.

I won't begin to speculate on what Season 3 might look like or even what I hope it will. I suspect that, by necessity, there will be a significant time jump as its been six years since Season 2 ended. Perhaps the children we saw will now play adolescents; perhaps they will be recast altogether. Beyond that, I'm not really sure how big a role they'd play – as I myself wrote Lies was never about the children as much as their parents.

The more important question may be who takes on the role of director. Andrea Arnold directed all of Season 2 and she took quite a bit of criticism. For the record I thought her work was superb, particularly in the opening scenes of many of the episodes when we saw the murder from each member of the Monterey Five's perspective from a different angle. There were other sequences – every time the women gathered together, the birthday party sequence, the climatic courtroom battle – where she showed a steady hand.

In recent years I've become more aware and admiring of the craft of the director in television than I was earlier on. We may need a director with experience in film as well as television to handle the third season. Two possibilities occur to me: one more sentimental then realistic and one who might be plausible.

The sentimental choice would be Alexander Payne. As an fan of independent film knows Payne has been nominated and won awards for his writing and direction of Citizen Ruth, Election and The Descendants which respectively showed what young actresses such as Dern, Witherspoon and Woodley were capable of even beyond their early talents. It probably wouldn't take much persuasion from any of these actresses to lure him in.

The more plausible and perhaps artistic choice would be Steven Zailian, who, unlike Payne, already has quite  a bit of great television work under his belt. He was the driving force behind The Night Of  (which lost most of the Emmys it was nominated for to Big Little Lies) and last year's Ripley for which he deservedly won the Emmy for Best Direction in a Limited Series. Zaillian has a gift both for the cinematic and the cerebral which would suit this show very well.

How long we have to wait for Season 3 is a matter of speculation: it's listed as being planned for 2026 but that's just a guideline. That said knowing that I will finally get a third season will be enough to wait. I did want it, want it bad and I'm not going to try to hide it. I will just try to believe. (Aren't you glad you didn't have to hear me sing that?) Seriously I will be glad to be spending more time with the Monterey Five once more. I think we all will.