Entertainment

Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/HBO

'Big Little Lies' Debuted With A Killer Premiere

by Anna Rose Iovine

The wait is finally over: the new HBO limited series, Big Little Lies, premiered Sunday and with a bang. The mysterious teasers led us to believe that something shady was going to happen, and the premiere only confirmed it. From the outside, the series may just be about a group of first graders and their helicopter parents; from the first few moments, though, you could tell that would not be the case and that's mainly due to the fact that a murder has occurred, or at least will occur at some point in the story. So who dies on Big Little Lies? In an interesting twist, both the killer and the victim remain unknown.

For those of us (yours truly included) who read the novel for which the show is based on, you already know. I know, you're biting your tongue not to scream out who and why and where and with the candlestick (just kidding, this isn't Clue). Like the beginning of the novel, though, the premiere does not give anything away... well, other than the slightly obvious fact that someone died and by the hand of someone else.

There are several sequences in the premiere in which a woman, presumably a member of the police, releases some details of the crime to the public. The victim apparently had a broken pelvis along with a fracture at the base of their skull, which made them decide to rule the death as a homicide.

Naturally, the two questions we care about most are who is the victim and who is the murderer? From the premiere we already see tension in the community — not only among the parents themselves, but with their children as well. We see that Madeline has a contentious relationship with her ex-husband and his second wife, Nathan and Bonnie, respectively. We also know she's not buddy-buddy with Renata, another fellow mother. In the brief interrogation scenes, though, we see that it wasn't just Madeline who didn't like the others in town: everyone had something to complain about.

Then there's Madeline's best friend, Celeste, and her husband, Perry. At first they seemed like the perfect couple with their twin boys, but towards the end of the episode the cracks began to show. Could they somehow be involved? It's only been one episode, and we have so many questions, which is similar to reading the first few chapters of Big Little Lies. The good news is, these questions will eventually be answered; the bad news is, we'll have to wait.