8.1 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
In season two, on the surface, everything seems the same in the seaside town of Monterey, CA: mothers continue to dote, husbands support, children are adorable, houses are beautiful. But the night of the school fundraiser changed all that, leaving the community reeling as the "Monterey Five" bond together to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Meanwhile, Perry's grieving mother Mary Louise Wright comes to town IN SEARCH OF answers after son's death.
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgård, Adam ScottCrime | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
English SDH, French
Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (2 BDs)
Region free
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
If you think about it (and some of us who evidently have way too much time on our hands and/or minds have thought about it), a lot of traditional broadcast television series were structured so that a hoped for run of several years could be accomplished without reinventing the wheel every week (so to speak). What that often boiled down to, at least in terms of many dramas, was typically a show with at least one or two well defined characters who were often in some sort of career where a variety of people and plots could arrive and depart, but where the foundational premise stayed intact (comedies can be focused on families quite a bit of the time, where any job might be tangential, though of course there are numerous examples of workplace sitcoms as well). There are therefore countless shows built around (to cite three prevalent examples) doctors, lawyers and/or policemen where different cases (medical or legal) could fill an episode or two, only to be replaced with something ostensibly different. So-called “short form” series culled from literary sources have a somewhat narrower line to toe, and in the case of Big Little Lies, some may wonder why a second “season” for this show was ever deemed “necessary” to begin with. One probably need look no further than audience numbers and award nominations to figure that out, but the fact that the source novel by Liane Moriarty that gave birth to the first season had a story with a beginning, middle and end, and some might argue without too much objection from folks that the first season dealt with all of those “sections” well enough. Was there a coda in the book that went unaddressed in the first season? Yes. Were there a few other dangling plot threads that Moriarty’s book included that didn’t ultimately make it into the first season of Big Little Lies? Probably indubitably. Does that in and of itself mean that a second season was required? That may be a decidedly more debatable proposition.
Big Little Lies: The Complete Second Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Warner Archive Collection (HBO seems to have off loaded at least some of its Blu-ray releases to Warner Archive) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While cinematography duties passed from the first season's Yves Bélanger to Jim Frohna for this second year, according to this article, he continued to use Arri Alexa Minis, but chose different lenses to "soften" some of the imagery. There's therefore some of the same haziness that I mentioned in the Big Little Lies Blu-ray review, along with what I'd term some intentionally impressionistic imagery (see screenshot 5) at times, but on the whole this is another very well detailed and sharp looking presentation. As Frohna mentions in the above linked article, he wanted a somewhat desaturated look, and so things can look a bit tamped down in terms of the palette, but detail levels are routinely quite excellent throughout this season.
Big Little Lies: The Complete Second Season features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that has some noticeable surround activity in some of its outdoor moments especially, but which, quite like the first season, tends to retreat into more center positioned activity for the many dialogue scenes. Dialogue, ambient environmental effects and score are all presented with fine fidelity and no issues whatsoever with regard to dropouts, distortion or other damage.
When this season resorted to little shtick laden moments like Renata (Laura Dern) "educating" a new teacher about how to treat her daughter and then trying to leave "gracefully" while stumbling through an oncoming student marching band that just materializes out of nowhere, I was frankly rolling my eyes a little at what I perceived to be a telling downturn in writing. As fans of Moriarty's source novel may know, the "culprit" from the first season ultimately is tasked with a couple of hundred hours of community service, something that this second season of Big Little Lies doesn't really get to — which may mean we're in for another set of long detours before the last few paragraphs of Moriarty's source novel can be presented. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.
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