Sumptuously directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club), with an A-List cast, Big Little Lies initially seemed like a soapy drama with expensive production values—lowbrow TV masquerading as appointment television. Rich white people and rich white people’s problems can be escapist when you're a working stiff, and there’s certainly plenty of housing porn and designer clothing porn to feast your eyes on in Big Little Lies. But with each episode, a layer of superficiality was peeled away, and the show and its character’s depths were revealed.

Reese Witherspoon is great as Madeline, the nosy, gossipy, stay-at-home perfectionist mom, but the show’s soul is Nicole Kidman’s Celeste.

Say what you will about what Kidman allegedly has done to her face, she still has the ability to move you with a shy glance, the smallest head tilt, a coy smile, but her biggest gift is stillness.

While there’s ostensibly a murder to be solved, the abuse at the center of the show that Kidman’s character suffers at the hands of her husband, Perry, played with terrifying accuracy by Alexander Skarsgard, is the real mystery of Big Little Lies.

We know from the beginning that the show ends with a murder, and as the series played out, you could probably guess pretty well that it’d either be Celeste or Perry. But the real question is whether or not Celeste, as rich and as white and as privileged a woman as they come, would be able to leave Perry, who was so controlling of Celeste, she wasn’t allowed work as a lawyer anymore, rarely saw any friends outside of Madeline and Jane (Shailene Woodley), and had all the hallmarks of a kept woman cowering in fear.

The stunning scenes between Kidman and her shrink (Robin Weigert) were delicate, her questions to Celeste were delivered gingerly as if she was afraid to spook her client. While many might stereotype abuse as something that happens only in lower-economic class relationships—the term “wife-beater” conjures up a poorer man—Big Little Lies demonstrates that domestic violence is an equal opportunity employer. Yes, even beautiful blond, rich men who look like Alexander Skarsgard will hit you.

The finale finds Celeste on the floor cowering in pain, Perry having just punched her in the stomach. Each time he hits her, he gets bolder and less sorry for the damage he’s done. The other main storylines—Madeline’s affair with the theater director, her and her ex-husband’s squabbling—are mostly petty distractions rooted in jealousy and boredom. They get resolved via the denouement and the death. Jane's story—she's also a sexual abuse survivor—serves as the flip side to Celeste's. She poorer, less powerful, and has less means to survive abuse, but she does, and in a way, serves as a guidepost for Celeste.

The ending is Hollywoodish. Though the right person ended up dead on the stairs, and no one is going to jail for long, it’s hard to say that the ending is a upbeat one. Two kids are without a parent and a woman is going to be in recovery from mental and physical abuse for years. Happily ever after? That turned out to be the biggest little lie of them all.