The New 'Big Little Lies' Book Contains Major Season 3 Spoilers

Liane Moriarty published "Big Little Truths" on Aug. 25, a sequel to the novel that started all of this. Both Moriarty and HBO's Casey Bloys have confirmed it will be the basis for Season 3, which makes the book, functionally, a spoiler document that anyone can buy.

Where the story goes

It picks up roughly a decade after the original, with the same five women handling a new set of family and personal problems. The plot turns on a school event referred to as D-Day, at which a teacher and her husband are exposed for predatory behavior toward students.

That premise puts the series back on the ground it handled best the first time: a prosperous, tidy community discovering what it has been quietly declining to notice, and the specific social machinery that made the not-noticing possible. Season 1 worked because the mystery was really a vehicle for that. Season 2 worked less well because it was mostly a vehicle for Meryl Streep.

The catch for anyone treating it as a preview

There is a substantial complication in reading the book as a guide to the show. Season 2 was not based on Moriarty's writing at all — Mary Louise, and Streep's entire performance, were invented for television.

So the series has already demonstrated, at length and profitably, that it will depart from the source whenever it feels like it. Anyone reading "Big Little Truths" for advance information is getting a plausible outline rather than a script.

The real obstacle is arithmetic

Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz and Laura Dern reportedly cannot be in the same place to shoot until 2028. That is what happens when a prestige ensemble matures into five separate production companies with their own development slates and their own release calendars.

The irony is reasonably thick. A show about women whose lives are structurally overcommitted has become impossible to schedule because its cast's lives are structurally overcommitted.

So what do you do

The book is available now and the season is at minimum two years away. Read it and you know roughly where the story is heading; wait and you preserve a surprise for a production that may not use the material anyway.

There is no correct answer, which is an extremely Monterey problem to have.