Little Fires Everywhere. BURN.

Nora Ephron wrote or said something about how one of the worst things about getting older is that when you watch a movie or a TV show, you notice when period details are off, and it ruins the show for you. I knew exactly how she felt when I watched "Little Fires Everywhere."

LFE is a limited Hulu series based on Celeste Ng’s novel of the same title. I have not read the novel and probably won’t, now that I know how it ends. And also because I hated every minute of this terrible hot TV mess, though I did watch all eight episodes, so the joke is on me, I suppose.

Why did I hate this show so much? Well, let’s start with the period detail. It's so wrong in so many ways that I don’t have time to enumerate them all here. Suffice to say that you’ll need to do better than a few bars of “Tubthumping” before I will believe that the year is 1997. I was alive in 1997. I remember 1997. Frozen yogurt existed, but no one called it “froyo.” Cardigan sweaters existed, but not the open-front cascade-style cardigans that became all the rage in 2010 or so. I could list ten more examples, but I won't. And when LFE does get the period details right, it beats you over the head with them. Poor Sarita Choudhury probably sustained serious shoulder and neck damage from the weight of the 7-pound chunky David Yurman necklace that she wears in her first scene. It hurt me just to look at it.

The soundtrack is also a source of pain, with its terrible, terrible covers of angsty 90s girl singer-songwriter songs. I like Alanis as well as the next person, but I do not want to watch a self-important angry teenager perform “You Oughta Know” as a goshdarn violin solo. And “Uninvited” is apparently not slow and sad enough, because the wailing, agonized cover version on the LFE soundtrack is a mental health crisis set to music.

Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington are both fine actresses. In fact, it's their fault that I kept watching this drivel. “It has to get better,” I kept thinking. “Kerry and Reese won’t let me down.” Kerry and Reese: You let me down. I’m disappointed, ladies.

Obviously, Kerry and Reese are not solely to blame for the dreadfulness of LFE. Even with terrible material, their performances are reasonably good; even compelling in a few scenes. But they did serve as producers, so they bear at least some of the responsibility for clunky, obvious characterizations, completely lacking in subtlety. How do we know that Reese’s Elena is a raging, entitled bitch? Well, just look at that sleek blond grown-up Tracy Flick hair and those St. John ensembles and that French manicure, and that perfect Shaker Heights mansion with the insanely complicated family calendar hanging on the refrigerator. Of course she’s a raging, entitled bitch. And how do we know that Kerry’s Mia is an artist? She wears black clothes and chunky silver jewelry (not David Yurman chunky, though, or she'd never have the strength to lift her fucking paintbrush) and she listens to Velvet Underground and Nina Simone and she drives an old Chevy hatchback. Of course she’s an artist.


*****

Did you ever see “A League of Their Own?” If not, then stop reading this trash pile, and go and watch it. I’ll wait.


OK, so did you see the scene when the black spectator catches a ball, and Geena Davis’s Dottie smiles and motions to the woman to toss it back to her? And instead, the woman, who is excluded from participation in the all-white All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League, drills the ball 60 feet or so to Fredda Simpson’s Ellen Sue, who catches it and then rubs her hand, wincing a little. Ellen Sue and Dottie both give the woman a surprised smile and respectful nod; and she nods in return, satisfied that the players recognize her power. The whole scene takes about 15 seconds, and it says more about the injustice of racism and segregation than any 10,000-word polemic ever could.

“Little Fires Everywhere” is well-meaning. It has lots of true and important things to say about race and sex and privilege, about justice and injustice. It just doesn’t say them very well. It could have thrown a baseball; but instead, it wrote a 10,000-word polemic and then it shoved it down our throat, one compound-complex sentence at a time. Rather than trying to be Important and Relevant for eight hours, maybe it should have just gotten over itself and told us a story. I'm always all in for a story.