Reese Witherspoon has been sharing snaps of her Big Little Lies castmates – and, possibly, actual mates – on Instagram for months now. Her 17.8 million followers have seen them going bowling, catching a movie and goofing around for “Galentine’s Day”. Last week, however, came the squad-shot supreme: Witherspoon, Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, Nicole Kidman and new addition Meryl Streep arm-in-arm and laughing it up, as they posed for photographers at the NYC season two premiere. Her caption read: “The power of sisterhood and friendship is limitless! So proud to work with these remarkable ladies. Can’t wait to share Season 2 of @biglittlies with y’all! June 9th on @hbo”.
That down-home “y’all”, the girl power platitudes and all of it wrapped up with a seamless plug? To say Witherspoon’s Insta is “on brand” hardly begins to cover it. Big Little Lies’ movie-star cast has always been a draw, but since debuting on US television in 2017, it has positioned itself within a sorority of shows that not only centre on female friendship, but depict these relationships as the ultimate in glamorous empowerment. In Amazon Prime Video’s The Bold Type, junior employees of a Cosmopolitan-like women’s magazine love, laugh and like each other’s posts in an idealised version of New York. In BBC Three’s Clique, a group of students in Edinburgh experience an accelerated version of complex, intriguing female friendship.
The settings differ but the message is the same one we have been absorbing since Carrie Bradshaw first got splashed on a Manhattan sidewalk: you may have the adoring family, the fulfilling career and the designer wardrobe, but who are you without your girls? And what Sex and the City originated has now been perfected: Big Little Lies pulls off glossy TV feminism with all the type-A aplomb of Witherspoon’s character, Madeline, organising a PTA fundraiser.
You would be forgiven for assuming this was a show about something entirely different. The first season was adapted from Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel by Ally McBeal creator David E Kelley and told the story of a murder investigation in a wealthy Californian town. By the end of the first season, however, that mystery element had been sidelined, and in the opening episodes of season two, it’s barely even paid lip service to. When we return to Monterey, on the first day of a new school year, the lie told by the central characters doesn’t seem quite so “big little” any more. The events of last season are important, but mainly because of how they threaten to drive a wedge between the five women, and much less because of any palpable anxiety over the police or Perry’s mother, Mary Louise (Streep), discovering the truth about his death.
Meanwhile, season two’s stabs at social commentary are tellingly facile. There is Bonnie’s visiting mother (Crystal Fox) briefly skirting around whether her daughter’s feelings of isolation might be connected to her being the only black person in town. Or the line from Madeline’s daughter, Abigail (Kathryn Newton), about college kids “mulling a sex change”. It’s the kind of dismissive jibe that a grumpy middle-aged dad would come up with, and sounds odd coming from the mouth of a supposedly cool and conscientious teen. Elsewhere, the dialogue is as quippy and emotionally astute as ever, but the best scenes aren’t those that further the plot; they’re those in which the women are together in any configuration: bonding, or bitching, or bonding-through-bitching.
And if you are not here for those central relationships, then you must be here for all their luxe lifestyle trappings. Celeste, Renata and Madeline’s beachfront mansions have been the subject of numerous property porn write-ups in interiors magazines, while Monterey itself has become an increasingly popular destination, much to the delight of the city’s tourism officials, who have devised special tours. The opening credits sequence, featuring the five women driving central California’s spectacular coastal routes is clearly also a boon for Sky Atlantic’s official show sponsors, car manufacturers Volvo.
There’s more: the season one soundtrack album reached No 1 on the US’s Americana/Folk chart, and this season, HBO is partnering with $215-a-month, women-only private members’ club The Wing on screening events and a “custom retail capsule” comprising items from female-owned clothing and accessories brands. All in all, it is something of an inside joke that in season two Madeline has started a new career as a real-estate agent: “Oh my gosh!” she tells Bonnie (Kravitz), “in Monterey it is like printing money! I should have done this years ago!” It is difficult to determine the level of intention, but by depicting gal pals in an Insta-filtered glow, Big Little Lies may have stumbled – or strutted – on to TV’s most compelling commercial opportunity yet: female friendship as a commodity.
Product placement and sponsorship are not new, but as on-demand television services render the traditional 30-second spot obsolete, both brands and TV production companies must get creative. Since Big Little Lies’ viewers are being sold to all the time, in ways more or less overt, it makes sense that the show often has the look of high-end advertising. Or, more specifically, of sponsored content from an influencer’s Instagram feed. Most specifically, it looks like one of Reese Witherspoon’s posts promoting her “steeped in southern charm” lifestyle brand, Draper James. (Last summer Draper James launched its new “Madeline” dress, inspired by Witherspoon’s character via an Insta-posted pic of Witherspoon modelling the dress on set.) All of which contributes to a fake sense of closeness between the viewer and its characters.
“The intimacy and bond of strong female friendships is a rich emotional territory for brands because, if they get it right, they will gain value and loyalty, creating customers par excellence,” explains Dr Cui Su, former advertising creative and current head of advertising at Falmouth University. “Consumer feminism is so trendy at the moment that the girlfriend’s gaze is much more powerful than the male gaze. It’s considered un-feminist to care about what a man thinks, but for your circle of girlfriends that’s a different story; you want their approval.”
Nowhere does this trickle-down “femvertising” dynamic play out with more sinister elegance than on social media, where brands mine and infiltrate women’s social networks. “It’s pretty much Facebook and Instagram’s business model,” says Cui. “As a girlfriend, it’s almost obligatory to ‘like’ all your female friends’ posts. Platforms profit by selling this engagement to advertisers so their algorithms encourage this mutual female surveillance by pushing the visibility of such posts in the feed.” And “mutual female surveillance” could almost work as the town motto for gossipy Monterey, couldn’t it? At the very least, Draper James should turn it into a $40 slogan T-shirt.
Of course, Big Little Lies is not the only popular TV show to have built such successful “synergy”, as the branding execs like to say. When Stranger Things returns for a third season next month, you may notice Will Byers, Eleven and chums are more than usually thirsty for New Coke, a famously failed recipe tweak that Coca-Cola withdrew from the market after only three months. It was Netflix and the Duffer brothers who approached the soft drinks giant with the idea for a limited run of New Coke cans – not vice versa, according to Barry Smyth, Netflix’s head of global partnership marketing. The tie-in suggested itself because of season three’s setting during the 1985 New Coke era, plus it fits perfectly with the show’s defining nostalgia for a 1980s childhood. Nostalgia may also be the secret sweetener in Baskin-Robbins’s two new Stranger Things-inspired flavours: Eleven’s Heaven (waffle cone-flavoured ice-cream with chocolate-coated sugar cone pieces) and Upside Down Pralines (chocolate ice-cream with praline pecans and a chocolate caramel-flavoured ribbon).
These mechanisms are most effective not with pre-teens, or now-grown children of the 80s, but with the Big Little Lies target audience. They complement a sales technique that has been used on this demographic for decades. According to one psychological theory of advertising, “compensatory consumption” is triggered when we are presented with an image of perfection – typically, the airbrushed body of a model – made to feel inadequate by comparison, and then prompted to compensate for perceived inadequacies with a purchase. It’s the oldest trick in Don Draper’s Big Book of Selling Stuff to Women.
What’s new about the Big Little Lies model is how it roots out not our insecurities about our looks, but deeper insecurities about the quality of our intimate relationships and our associated self-worth. The most sophisticated and successful femvertising campaigns – such as Boots’ Here Come the Girls, or Dove’s Real Beauty – do both and are thus able to trigger compensatory consumption without ceding the feminist high ground. Big Little Lies, however, seems to focus on that latter, deeper kind of push-pull engagement. On Instagram, BLL fans are simultaneously invited to feel a part of the cool clique, as cast members share intimate behind-the-scenes photos, and pointedly excluded. Being one of 383,000 followers to like a photo is not the same as being one of “these remarkable ladies” in said photo, is it?
Does all this undermine the various claims made for Big Little Lies as empowering TV? (New York Magazine called it “a commentary on gender bias”). Professor Rosalind Gill of London’s City University is currently collaborating with Dr Sara De Benedictis at Brunel and Dr Bridget Conor at King’s on a paper about “feminist gloss” in television. “The ‘gloss’ idea speaks both to the emptying out of feminism as something superficial and the high production values,” says Gill. She feels ambivalent about the shows in question: “It is really good to see women’s friendships being foregrounded and forms of relating that are not – or not only – about meanness, rivalry or competitiveness. At the same time, I think the shows invite us into a highly limited world of privilege and glossy empowerment that doesn’t suggest any need to change the structures of racialised, patriarchal capitalism.”
While gloss can be a viewing pleasure unto itself, the fact of the Monterey Five’s nice clothes, nice cars and (likely) All Access membership at The Wing doesn’t make their emotional lives any less interesting. Even more than in season one, season two contains its own critique of the ultimate emptiness of consumerism and materialist values. In an early scene, Mary Louise (Streep) introduces a series theme of “the wanters” v “the contented”, when she says to Madeline: “Y’know, there are people in life who content themselves with what they have, and then there are others who just … who just want.” Later, Renata’s husband Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling) enrages her by saying: “We’re creatures of want. Me, you, especially you.” Even as it turns friendship into the ultimate lifestyle accessory, Big Little Lies knows that the bonds of female solidarity can’t ever be entirely commodified, because real friendship and community are beyond price. But at its chardonnay-swilling best, Big Little Lies also explores another connected, less trite truth of contemporary human nature: we know money can’t buy love, so why doesn’t that stop us from trying?
Season two of Big Little Lies starts Sunday 9, 2am, Sky Atlantic; repeated Monday 10 June, 9pm, Sky Atlantic
