Will ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Have a Second Season?
The Hulu limited series Little Fires Everywhere ended with a barn-burner finale on April 22—or a house-burner finale, as the case may be. But how “limited” is the Kerry Washington-Reese Witherspoon show anyway?
After all, the creative forces behind Big Little Lies—coincidentally, another “little” show starring Witherspoon and adapted from a literary bestseller—insisted there wouldn’t be a Season 2 before HBO ordered a Season 2. Could Little Fires Everywhere follow suit?
“Well, look, selfishly I want to say yes,” Little Fires Everywhere showrunner Liz Tigelaar told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published the day of the finale. “This has been one of the best experiences of my life. I would be in that writers’ room forever, and I would obviously write for Reese and Kerry and everybody involved for the rest of my life. So, I want to say yes. In my heart I feel like it’s a limited series, I feel like we told the story.”
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the endings of the Little Fires Everywhere series and book.]
Adding fuel to the speculation are the changes the Hulu drama’s writers made to the 2017 Celeste Ng novel’s ending, many of which made the TV ending more open-ended than its printed-page counterpart. In the book, for example, we don’t see Pearl (Lexi Underwood) arriving at her grandparents’ house, and we learn that Elena (Witherspoon) spends the rest of her life searching for Izzy (Megan Stott). “Unlike Ng’s book, the Hulu drama seems to want to leave a little room for a season two,” Vulture’s Jen Chaney observed in a post-finale debrief.
Pearl (Lexi Underwood) and Mia (Kerry Washington) (Erin Simkin/Hulu)
But for Tigelaar, it’d be hard to continue the story with both the Warrens and the Richardsons. “I would shudder to think of a contrived way to get Mia and Elena back in each other’s orbit that would at all feel real,” she told ET. “I guess I would never want to say never, but I see this as a story that had its beginning, middle, and end. And I love the ending. I wouldn’t want to diminish Celeste’s book by, I don’t know, not cannibalizing it, but I wouldn’t want to diminish it by turning it into what it isn’t just because people liked it. I’ll be happy if it stays what it is, but at the same time, yes, selfishly I would of course love it to continue.”
Still, Hollywood being Hollywood, limited series have a funny habit of earning additional seasons—see also: Under the Dome—and Tigelaar also reflected on that prospect in a post-finale interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I’d be open to it in terms of this is the best job I’ve ever had,” she said. “This was such an amazing treat of work experience, adapting something that I love with all my heart, with people who I love with all my heart.”
In a Vulture interview, meanwhile, Tigelaar admitted there are “more stories to tell” and floated the idea of a Little Fires Everywhere spinoff instead of a second season.
Elena (Reese Witherspoon) and Bill (Joshua Jackson) (Erin Simkin/Hulu)
For her part, Ng told Vulture, “Never say never,” and cites Phoebe Waller Bridge’s decision to do a second Fleabag season years after the first. “These characters may come back to me with an idea about more story that needs to be told,” she said. “Right now, I feel like the series did such a good job of ending where you have an idea of what people’s trajectory is going to be. We don’t see it, but we have an idea of what’s changed for each of them, and from that we can extrapolate. So right now I don’t have more to say about them, but maybe three years from now, we’ll make another episode and there’s gonna be a hot priest.”
Little Fires Everywhere, Streaming Now, Hulu
