After months of fevered speculation and a handful of prestigious awards wins for its cast, it seems a second season of Big Little Lies may finally be in the works.
According to a new report in TVLine, HBO will go into production on a second season as early as next spring. Though the channel is yet to officially confirm its next move, writer David Kelly told TVLine: ‘We’re kicking around ideas and trying to lasso the talent [and] get the band back together. It’s just a lot of logistical things. But I’m optimistic that everyone wants to do it. We feel we still have storytelling to do. No decision has been made yet, but we’re hopeful. Where we left it, I felt like it did open the opportunity for a lot more storytelling.’
Indeed, the HBO miniseries, which debuted this spring, certainly ended with a handful of loose ends still to be tied. Big Little Lies is based on Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel and boasted the starriest of star-studded casts, featuring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman (who won an Emmy for her part of domestic abuse victim Celeste), Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Zoe Kravitz as a group of over-achieving mothers apparently living the dreamiest of lives in Monterey, California. As the first episode unfolds, however, it soon becomes clear that the reality is not so simple: someone in the mums’ tight-knit, aesthetically pleasing community has been murdered.
Rumours of a second season have been further fuelled by news that Reese Witherspoon has left The Pale Blue Dot, a film that she’d been set to star in and produce, to clear her schedule for Big Little Lies next spring. The rest of the show’s A-list cast has previously hinted they’d be up for reprising their roles, while Witherspoon (who served as an exec producer on the show, along with her friend Kidman) was discussing the prospect as early as April this year.
Talking to E! News shortly after the series’ conclusion, she revealed, ‘Nicole and I just spoke to Liane Moriarty, who wrote the book, about how could these characters go on, what would happen? We definitely left it open-ended so there’s a possibility there.’
Moriarty, meanwhile, told E!: ‘The producers have asked me to see if I can come up with some ideas. I wouldn’t write a new book but perhaps a new story and then we’ll see what happens. I’m absolutely open to it because, once I started thinking, it was too much fun to see what I could do and to see these characters again. And there’s definitely places you can go.
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