‘Little Disasters’ Review: Perfect Mothers, Perfect Houses, Imperfect Series

Built like the perfect combo for that supposedly captive audience of true-crime-style series, Little Disasters lines up all the standard-issue elements, neatly arranged and ready to seduce. It is a story about women — all of them mothers with complicated relationships with partners and children — whose plot includes a potential criminal matter and involves wealthy people who live in elegant houses and dress as if they were posing for perfume ads. This British series, adapted from a novel by Sarah Vaughan (not the jazz singer, the author of Anatomy of a Scandal), presents itself as a compilation of many other hit shows, and the end result is exactly that: a mix-and-match of ingredients that could work, should work, but don’t always work.

Still, the premise is gripping. And that is what creator Ruth Fowler (Rules of the Game) uses to keep viewers invested. But from the first glossy shots it becomes clear that Little Disasters will lean into an exaggerated version of its story, as if the entire cast knew they were starring in a crime thriller and acted accordingly, staring at even a glass of water as if it were a suspect. The most conspicuous case is Diane Kruger, usually a subtle and refined performer, who here delivers such a grotesque rendition of the “perfect woman” that she seems to be parodying Nicole Kidman throughout. The expression she wears in the promotional still at the top of this review is the same one she maintains across all six episodes.

The Inglourious Basterds actress plays Jess, a woman jolted awake in the middle of the night when her husband tells her that their ten-month-old daughter Betsy is crying more than usual and urges her to take the baby to the emergency room. Jess goes, and there she’s seen by Liz (Jo Joyner), the pediatrician on call who also happens to be a close friend. Liz discovers that Betsy has a skull fracture. Since Jess offers no sensible explanation (she only says the baby “fell while crawling”) and looks visibly nervous, Liz decides to call Social Services to handle the situation, with all the implications that entails: potential parent-child separation, bureaucratic chaos, and added tension because the two are friends. But Liz senses something is off and doesn’t hesitate. It is, she says, her duty as a doctor.

That call sets off a complicated web of people and events. On one track, the series follows the investigation into what may have happened to the baby, with Jess and her husband Ed (JJ Feild) at the center, though attention also turns to their other two children. On another track, the narrative moves into the past to explore not only Jess and Liz’s not-so-simple friendship but also the larger group of friends who all met more than a decade earlier in a prenatal class. The group includes the high-powered Charlotte (Shelley Conn), a lawyer and firm partner married to the wealthy Andrew (Patrick Baladi); the more middle-class Mel (Emily Taaffe), whose peculiar husband Rob (Stephen Campbell Moore) dreams of becoming a music impresario; and Liz’s husband, Nick (Ben Bailey Smith), plus the aforementioned Ed, the archetypal big guy in finance who spends more time at the gym or at the bar than with his children.

The relationships among all these characters connect past and present, offering potential clues to what really happened to Betsy while also supplying commentary on current events through the series’ mock-documentary interviews with Liz, Charlotte, and Mel. Within this ensemble dynamic, tensions surface — some tied to Jess’s anti-vaccine stance and distrust of hospitals, others to class differences within the group, plus the usual mix of jealousy, possible affairs, and marital strain. It’s an explosive cocktail that incorporates nearly every standard trope of the true-crime genre.

The premise of false appearances, supposedly perfect mothers, and the thorny issue of parental violence has the potential to be compelling, but Little Disasters uses it mostly as a springboard for generating a crime plot rather than truly probing those themes. One shouldn’t expect a series like this to shed profound light on such a complex subject, but at times here it feels like an excuse for Kruger and company to stride through various sets looking suspicious… of having burned dinner.

The episodes, all directed by Eva Sigurðardóttir, maintain that comfortable IKEA-catalog look, even when scenes turn tense or violent. Nothing seems to ruffle Jess; even when she collapses to the floor in despair, she somehow lands in a pose perfectly suited for the show’s poster. The most relatable character is Liz — who has the air of a fairly typical British woman — yet even there the series leans hard on the idea that no one is truly what they seem and that deep down anyone could be guilty of something. Or at least look like they are.