Did you know everyone is just awful? That’s the de facto message of Little Disasters, the latest of what is an increasingly cookie-cutter subgenre that boasts all the trappings of prestigious literary adaptations without the earned prestige. Little Disasters isn’t The Perfect Couple which isn’t Apples Never Fall, but forgive yourself if you didn’t realize.

In this version, four couples meet in a support group for people struggling with infertility. Jess (Diane Kruger) is an uber crunchy type—beautiful, never harried, and utterly unshakeable in her resistance to medicine. She wants a homebirth with a doula and a midwife and plans to avoid as much medical care as possible, including, notably, any vaccinations. Her husband Ed (JJ Field, looking and sounding like a skim milk version of Dominic West’s character from The Affair)is in finance and doesn’t seem to care one way or another about his wife’s anti-science bend. That the show never gets into the fact that she is so opposed to modern medicine but willing to undergo IVF is one in a series of missed opportunities.

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Liz (Jo Joyner), an A&E (the British equivalent of the ER) doctor, also stays oddly quiet on the issue, save for a few moments fueled by liquid courage. Her husband Nick (Ben Bailey Smith) seems decent enough. Beyond occasionally mentioning Liz’s drinking might be problematic, that’s sort of all there is to him. Credit where credit is due, though: he does convince her to go sober. It’s a task she seemingly does without difficulty once she starts. Nevermind being a doctor; she should be a case study.

Mel (Emily Taaffe) is a stay-at-home type, at her partner Rob’s (Stephen Campbell Moore) insistence. He fancies himself a record executive. In practice, though, most of his wheeling and dealing seems to begin and end with trying unsuccessfully to get his wealthier friends to invest in his company. Andrew (Patrick Baladi) is the richest of them, due to family money, and he and his wife Charlotte’s (Shelley Conn) successful careers as lawyers.

Years after they meet, Jess brings her youngest (of three), Betsy, into the A&E late one night. The toddler has a skull fracture, forcing Liz to call social services. The friend group, already frayed, begins to shatter in the wake of this event. Secrets revealed, backs stabbed. You know how these things are.

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Anyway, the message that everyone is secretly (or not-so-secretly) rotten is clearly not the intention of co-writers Ruth Fowler (also the series creator) and Amanda Duke. It was likely not Sarah Vaughan’s intention, the author of the source material. Every indicator points to it as a sort of “you never know who has it easy or tough and why?” kind of empathy drama. Every indicator except the result.

Admittedly, I’m being a bit unfair. The characters experience better and worse moments. Unfortunately, when at their worst, the show can’t seem to frame them as complex. It feels a bit like Little Disasters is asking the audience to show empathy for characters for whom it itself has little.

The series’ misbegotten attempts to develop empathy for its characters is its most significant misstep, but hardly its only one. Some—but not all—the main characters occasionally directly address the camera as though interviewed for a quickie True Crime doc about the very story we’re already watching. As no such purpose ever materializes, it’s a frustrating choice. It plays as an excuse to grab some of the book’s more purple moments of prose and push them out the mouths of the characters.

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There’s also the anti-science-ness of Jess, an artifact of time that Little Disasters makes no effort to update for the present moment. At the book’s publication in 2004, the kind of rigid anti-medical-establishment parent Jess uses generally got treated as quirkier (or perhaps more annoying) than concerning. In 2025, however, it has a very different valence. The show need not take sides, per se, on the matter. Still, treating it as largely inconsequential feels wildly out of step with the present.

This is especially the case with Jess and Ed’s middle child, Frankie, who quite obviously qualifies for a spectrum diagnosis. Jess’s refusal to utilize the vast medical resources available to her is detrimental to Frankie, to her, and very nearly to the continued existence of their family. To handwave that as a bit of “oh different strokes” is ill-advised, to put it mildly. It isn’t just a moral issue either. The show is all about the capital D “Drama.” To leave this kind of conflict on the table is plot malpractice.

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Given the (well-earned) negativity of this review, one might be a bit surprised when they first turn in. The show looks quite good, for one. Both Joyner and Kruger’s performances make an immediate impact, for another. Additionally, there are some interesting filming choices, such as small jump cuts that not only reflect Jess’s emotional state but also warn viewers that nothing they’ve seen is necessarily the truth. However, the techniques grow stale in time. Go-nowhere subplots and that aforementioned drinking problem too often sideline Joyner. In the end, only Kruger gets to take things end-to-end. But she’s also the one authoring a mom-as-hero who is so opposed to modern medicine that she won’t get her middle child the kind of support he needs. So it isn’t as clean a win as it might appear on first blush.

Little Disasters isn’t important enough to get saddled with some pun headline like “It is a disaster, but not a small one.” But it isn’t good. It doesn’t manage its characters, pace, or plot well. It feels unstuck from time in a way that makes it worse with each missed opportunity to pull it into today. Glimmers of good performances get buried under overly verbose melodrama. The worst of it, though, is that it wants to tell a story about not rushing to judgment. Then it spends six episodes accidentally making the opposite argument.

Little Disasters frets away the advantages of nationalized health care on Paramount+ starting December 11.

Little Disasters Trailer: