Big Little Lies - Season 2 (2019 David E. Kelley, director Andrea Arnold)

According to Indiewire, Arnold was given free rein to shoot it in her style - 'the restless camera', the acting - Kidman and Witherspoon are said to have loved working with her - only to have the show taken away from her by Vallée at the editing stage, and even Vallée overseeing 17 days of additional photography. Thus, we can see frustrating snatches of Arnold - restless hands, Woodley dancing on the beach in headphones, even a single shot of dust hanging in the air at the psychiatrists, hand held intimacy - but it feels like the Arnold has been taken out of her scenes.

The editing is great - those little flash cuts - but we now don't know to whose editorial team they belong. And the more it goes on, the more you think it's Vallée's style. (Up to eleven editors are credited.) And whilst she shot sixty page scripts, the episode lengths vary from 39 to 49 minutes, and you feel it's those wandering camera bits that are now missing. Plus, lots of season one flashbacks were added (like, at the beginning of every episode) which with all this in hindsight now looks like padding.

Considering it was supposedly a strong female-led project, it's all very disappointing.

Anyway, with what we've got left, the shit is unravelling beautifully all over the place after the death of Skarsgaard in series one, exacerbated by the presence of his mum, brilliantly played by Meryl Streep, who comes over like a slightly psycho Miss Marple, and won't leave anything alone. Kidman is behaving erratically, Witherspoon and her husband Adam Scott are falling apart, Dern's husband James Tupper is going to bankrupt them, Zoe Kravitz is a mess, Woodley is threatened by Streep who's her son's grand-mother.

It wraps nicely, and is very stylishly edited, but sadly remains something of a compromise.

Jim Frohna's on camera.