Reese Witherspoon’s popular feminism: adaptation and authorship in Big Little Lies

ABSTRACT

Through her programmes, including Big Little Lies (2017–2019), The Morning Show (2019–), and Little Fires Everywhere (2020), Reese Witherspoon has been central to the recent rise of women-centric television. Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, and her book club, Reese’s Book Club, aim to ‘shine a light’ on women’s work, vocalising an explicitly feminist approach to authorship and adaptation. Identifying Witherspoon’s politics as a form of popular feminism, this article uses Big Little Lies (BLL) as a case study to investigate the various strategies Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine deploy to articulate this feminism. Identifying sisterhood as a key strategy, this article points to the limits of popular feminism by revealing who is excluded from this female collective: director Andrea Arnold, whose creative control was allegedly undermined when directing BLL’s second season; and BLL’s Black female characters, who are narratively excluded from this construction. This article, then, calls for feminist critics to be attentive to the selective and exclusionary nature of popular feminism in television as it obscures the material conditions of women working in television production roles and the sexist and racist structures governing women’s representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Big Little Lies
• Reese Witherspoon
• Hello Sunshine
• Andrea Arnold
• popular feminism
• HBO

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Witherspoon originally produced films and television programmes, including Big Little Lies, under her production company, Pacific Standard, which she co-founded with Bruna Papandrea in 2012. In 2016, Pacific Standard became a subsidiary of Witherspoon’s larger media company Hello Sunshine. In 2021, Hello Sunshine was sold to content company Candle Media. Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine’s CEO, Sarah Harden, sit on the board of Candle Media, continue to oversee day-to-day operations, and remain significant equity holders.

2. Previous versions of Hello Sunshine’s website made the ‘shine the light’ metaphor more explicit, claiming: ‘We tell stories we love – from big to small, funny to complex – all shining a light on where women are now and helping them chart a new path forward … We are about shining a light on female authorship and agency’. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210129074100/https://hello-sunshine.com/our-story [accessed 29 August 2023].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Louise Smyth

Sarah Louise Smyth is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Essex, UK. Her work focuses on women’s authorship and the screen industries, and she has published essays on British women filmmakers. She is currently beginning a new project on Nora Ephron and has recently published the chapter “Nora, Julie, Julia: Legacies of Older Women in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2009)” in Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries (2023).