When a TV Adaptation Does What the Book Could Not

In a scene like this, the series captures the relationship dynamics as illustrated in the novel and furthers them: Lexie already perceives herself to be more powerful than Pearl, because of her age and social standing at school, but how would their races play into that? If “color-blindness”—a popular ideology in the ’90s—means seeing “beyond” race, why does Lexie need to confirm that Pearl agrees that marginalization for being black is the same as marginalization for being a girl? The book and the series may be set decades ago, but these questions make the show feel timely, reflecting the ways that perhaps little has changed.

In changing Mia and Pearl’s race, however, the writers of Little Fires Everywhere needed to ensure that they told the characters’ stories authentically. As a white woman, the showrunner, Liz Tigelaar, pondered the issue—one that’s been at the center of several recent controversies over art and authentic authorship—early on. “It’s like, why are you the person to adapt this novel?” she said. “I think that’s a fair question.”

To answer it, Tigelaar began by searching for her “points of connectivity” with the source material. (For instance, she drew from her experience as an adoptee to understand the novel’s subplot about an adopted child whose mother wants to regain custody.) From there, she sought writers who could personally connect with characters’ perspectives, ones who understood the experience of black women, of single mothers, of adoptive parents, of suburban Ohioans, and so on—in her words, “the whole gamut.” “I knew things were going to change [as a result of Mia and Pearl being black], and I had my own ideas of how they would change,” she said, “but it really wasn’t until all our voices came together with everyone’s point of view that we were able to really go in and start to reexamine every moment.” Eventually, the writers’ room grew to seven people, larger than average for a limited series such as this, which usually hires three to four writers. “We collaborated with the studio and found the money,” Beatrice Springborn, Hulu’s VP of content development, told me over the phone, “because we felt like it was the right thing to do for this project.”

Alot may be riding on the series’ success, but there’s even more pressure on the writers to do the story justice. After all, it’s not as if Little Fires Everywhere, the book, ignored the topic of race. Ng tackles the subject deftly in the subplot about a Chinese baby adopted by a white family, whose mother tries to take her back. In that arc, the characters debate the child’s future and the notion of whether she would have a “better life” with an adoptive family who doesn’t understand her culture, or with a single mother who does.

That conflict has begun to play out in the series as well. But while the book refuses to take a side, the show escalates the drama: In the third episode, Bebe Chow (Lu Huang), the baby’s biological mother, stormed into the adoptive family’s home, desperate to see her child. The fourth episode then followed Elena’s efforts to stop Bebe from pursuing custody by offering her $10,000—money that Bebe rejects, insulted by Elena’s attempt to buy her out. Elena, the show suggests, is in the wrong. Tigelaar, an adoptee herself, told me the series isn’t trying to demonize adoption, but to illustrate one of many debates the shows’ writers themselves had when interpreting Ng’s novel: whether Elena sided with the adoptive parents simply because they’re friends, or because they’re white and therefore more fit to raise a child in her eyes.

Those debates were the point. Tigelaar wanted to establish a “common language” in the room about the book’s social commentary, so she assigned homework—including the sociologist Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism—and asked the team to share research and reading material. She encouraged her writers to wrangle with every plot point. “Every choice, every line of dialogue, every debate in the room, when I watch the episodes, feel so scrutinized because everyone kicked the tires,” Tigelaar said. “The room was a really transformative experience. I came out of it a very different person.”