Big Little Lies gave birth to a modern soapy TV subgenre in which beautiful moms with seemingly ideal lives—handsome spouses, plenty of money, opulent homes, swanky vacations and parties, lovely children—turn out to have deep, dark secrets which involve jealousy, betrayal, infidelity, and deception, and which lead to, among other things, abuse, abduction, and murder.
Paramount+’s six-episode Little Disasters, premiering Dec. 11, doesn’t deviate from that formula, squeezing pulpy melodrama from the story of a picture-perfect mother who arrives at a hospital with her sick infant, only to have her best friend, a nurse, determine that the kid is the potential victim of a crime. Sudsy beyond belief, it’s another tale of upper-middle-class dysfunction, and one whose twists and turns are almost as laughable as its climactic value judgments.
Jess (Diane Kruger) races to a London Accident and Emergency room in the middle of the night because her baby daughter Betsy appears to be ill. When Jess’ on-call BFF Liz (Jo Joyner) checks the tyke, she discovers injuries consistent with a skull fracture. When a CT scan confirms her suspicions, Betsy is placed in the ICU and Liz, in the face of a wholly awkward situation, notifies child social services.
This causes great friction between Liz and Jess, even though the former—who can’t fathom doting Jess hurting her little one—is following mandatory protocol. Before long, social worker Lucy (Chizzy Akudolu) and Detective Constable Rustin (Robert Gilbert) are investigating Jess as well as her husband Ed (JJ Feild), who says he’s ignorant about the entire situation since he came home late that night, drunk, after going out for post-work drinks.
Jess is an immediate suspect in this offense because she was the lone adult with Betsy that evening, and because her story—she claims Betsy tried to pull herself up and then fell backwards—is inconsistently told, refuted by evidence found at her house, and just plain unbelievable.
Not helping Jess is the fact that she’s an anti-science, anti-medicine, anti-vaccine wacko who hasn’t taken Betsy, her third child, to see a doctor since she was born, and whose behavior is intensely evasive. Little Disasters makes its protagonist out to have a barrelful of screws loose, and that’s its first mistake; by pointing an initial finger so insistently in Jess’ direction, it makes clear that she’s innocent of the charges leveled against her and will ultimately be exonerated.
Ruth Fowler’s series (based on Sarah Vaughan’s novel) is awash in florid narration and clunky to-the-camera addresses by Jess’ coterie of friends, who include Liz, who’s married to schoolteacher Nick (Ben Bailey Smith); Mel (Emily Taaffe), a stay-at-home mom betrothed to wannabe record label bigwig Rob (Stephen Campbell Moore); and Charlotte (Shelley Conn), a lawyer like her husband Andrew (Patrick Baladi) who’s been close with Ed since university.
From a storytelling standpoint, Little Disasters is only slightly more graceful than your average Hallmark Channel movie, and it quickly sets about hinting at the cracks in this close-knit unit, which was formed when they all met at a prenatal class. In one of the proceedings’ many flashbacks, a vacation at a plush tropical resort reveals that Jess is an overbearing control freak when it comes to her kids; Liz has a borderline drinking problem that turns her neglectful; Charlotte is overly interested in Ed; and Rob is a loudmouth prick—indications that, as Jess intones in the premiere, “perfection is an illusion.”
Tensions mount as Little Disasters puts Jess through the wringer, denying her access to Betsy without third-party supervision, and forcing her to have Mel move into the house to keep tabs on her when she’s with her sons Kit (Jago Bilderbeck) and Frankie (Jax James), the latter of whom is an unstable boy prone to freak-outs.
The show gradually divulges details about each of its characters’ less-than-sunshiny lives, all as a means of suggesting that Jess, Ed, or someone else was responsible for Betsy’s condition. The most glaring of these is the fact that, on the night in question, Ed wasn’t with colleagues; instead, he spent eight hours in a bar with Charlotte, the two of them flirting up a storm—and coming close to acting on their impulses—while reminiscing about the good old days.
Little Disasters plays a tired game, luxuriating in its protagonists’ wealth and then using a scarily plausible scenario (i.e., being wrongly accused of hurting a child) to tear down their ostensibly impeccable façades. Fowler gussies up her action by staging traumatic incidents that turn out to be figments of Jess’ frazzled imagination, and she casts Betsy’s accident (or was it?!?) as the catalyst for everyone to fall apart.
It’s all so very predictable and, worse, preachy, with Liz, Jess, and Charlotte’s fourth wall-breaking commentary filled with hokey pronouncements (“Turns out, being a perfect mother is impossible”) that don’t inform so much as state the obvious. That there are merely three episodes’ worth of material is an additional obstacle the series struggles to overcome, padding out installments with interpersonal conflicts tangentially related to the primary crisis.
The mystery of what happened to baby Besty is tied up in issues of postpartum depression, homeopathy quackery, and shady deceit, but Little Disasters employs them as simply hot-button embellishments. The series is afraid to take an actual stand in favor of put-upon women and against “Earth mother” lunacy that jeopardizes the well-being of innocent, powerless children, turning the entire affair into a goofy lark.
Furthermore, multiple plot points are utterly daft, such as a harried Jess successfully abducting Betsy from her ICU wing thanks to there being no alarms or monitors to alert staff to a patient disconnecting from medical devices. Cheap sensationalism is one thing; dim-wittedness is another.
Reveling in the rich and attractive unraveling in spectacular fashion, and culminating with a you-go-girl resolution that absolves certain characters of their grave parental failures, Little Disasters is, in the end, unserious—a shortcoming that extends to its performances, which are broad, histrionic, and monotonous. Constantly silly and yet too minor to be an outright catastrophe, it’s a show that flawlessly lives up to its title.
