This is one of the most anticipated and monitored events of the media year. Imagined by a veteran American television veteran, David Edward Kelley, creator of Ally McBeal, and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, to whom we owe in particular the film Dallas buyers club, the mini-series "Big little lies" landed on HBO and all over the world.

His first trump: an unusual female cast, probably the most chic in the history of the series, bringing Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz and David Lynch's face, Laura Dern.

They represent five mothers living on the coast of Monterey, California, whose daily routine derails one spring evening when a mysterious crime is committed within their small community.

With such a pitch, one could have expected an umpteenth police series, a macabre Cluedo whose sole purpose would have been to know the identity of the culprit. But "Big little lies" quickly escapes from these wacky codes and takes the form of a hyperrealistic feminist chronicle, in which the only function of the murder is to reveal the lies and secrets that haunt each of the characters.

Without ever leaving the thread of his criminal case, the series presents the pointillistic portrait of American women from different generations, confronted with the dramas of the time: loneliness, conjugal violence, moral and educational pressure on parents, difficulty reconciling professional and intimate lives.

Brilliantly written, embodied by actresses in a state of grace, including a Nicole Kidman shocking as a battered woman, the series immediately imposes itself as one of the most beautiful successes of the year TV, a more bitter version and melancholy of Desperate housewives. Hopefully it reaches the same highs.

"Big little lies" by David Edward Kelley, with Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, since February 20 on OCS City.

DVD Release: August 9, 2017