Over the weekend, I finally finished Big Little Lies, which reminded me of the articles on genre and melodrama we read this week (It also reminds me of Morse's article on ontologies of distraction, partially because the characters spend so much time in the car). The show is a melodrama that slowly incorporates elements of a police drama over the course of the season.
I think the show aligns with Krystle's observation that "without the pressure of appealing to a broad, network audience, shows [like Big Little Lies] are relieved from tapping into an overall zeitgeist and encouraged to filter particular generic conventions that promote a unique aesthetic." Perhaps though, melodrama is the zeitgeist, since its form has proliferated throughout television. It's hard not to read the show as a commentary on the social networks of affluent women and the hope that women might be allies instead of enemies.
Maybe the show avoids the stigma of melodrama by a) being a prestige drama on HBO and b) hiring an all-star cast of Hollywood women who have had successful film careers (Meryl Streep has signed on for the second season) whose shift to TV is no longer read as failure. Perhaps the show takes melodrama seriously by elevating it to a prestige aesthetic form.
It's funny that the subheadline for the New Yorker (prestige indeed!) article you link to describes Big Little Lies as "a prestige-TV twist on Real Housewives," since a reality series like Real Housewives just as much exemplifies the extent to which, as you put it, melodrama is the zeitgeist as do scripted dramas. But of course these different forms package their melodrama in wildly different ways, inviting, it would seem, different sorts of justifications on the parts of viewers for the time invested in the show. For instance, one might be into Real Housewives ironically, or as a social activity. Nussbaum's subheadline, meanwhile, asserts that Big Little Lies is not merely a prestige-y schadenfreude fest. It more importantly (more "seriously") also "deepens, and becomes a sensitive reflection on trauma."
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