Warning: Spoilers ahead for Little Disasters
It all starts with a phone call. Liz (Jo Joyner) has to do something she wouldn’t have dreamed in her worst nightmares. As a nurse, she’s bound by duty to call social services on her best friend Jess (Diane Kruger), who’s come to the ER with her baby Betsy with a head injury she has no explanation for. That’s the inciting incident of the new Paramount+ series Little Disasters, based on the Sarah Vaughan novel of the same name. It’s an incident that threatens to destroy the perfect family life that Jess has built with her husband Ed (JJ Feild) and their three children, as well as the decade-long friendship between Jess, Liz, and their friends Charlotte (Shelley Conn) and Mel (Emily Taaffe).
At the beginning of the finale, Jess is facing jail time for the mistreatment of her three children, and her mental health is in complete crisis. She’s on the brink of losing everything. Kruger, Vaughan, and show co-writer Amanda Duke spoke to TIME about the twisty finale of Little Disasters.
Beyond the central mystery of who hurt Betsy is the deteriorating friendship between Jess and Liz. Liz’s decision to call social services on her friend changes the course of Jess’s life in a clearly negative way, as she awaits a hearing to see if she’ll be able to see her children again. Liz, of course, was right to report Jess. “She had to make the call. There are hospital protocols; that call has to happen,” says Vaughan. But the ramifications of the call aren’t something Jess can ignore.
At the hearing, however, Liz makes an impassioned plea for Jess as her character witness, telling the judge that she’s a wonderful mother and that she even goes to Jess for advice on how to raise her own kids. Because of this moving display, the judge grants Jess bail under the condition of her living with Liz, and allows Jess to have two supervised visits with her children a week.
As Kruger sees it, Jess is processing a myriad of emotions in that moment, but is grateful for Liz. “If the tables were turned, Jess would have made that same call,” she says. “I think by the end of the show, Jess has come to terms with admitting that she needs help. Seeing a true friend like Liz in these times, even though she had to do the impossible, is confusing. If she never made the call, none of this would have happened, yet Liz ultimately is the savior of Jess because she forced her into a situation of healing.” With Liz standing up for Jess when she needs it most, there’s a real opportunity for their relationship to heal.
Who really hurt Betsy?
Later, Jess visits her children with Ed at the school’s summer fair. The ladies are together for what might be the last time, as Mel’s husband Rob (Stephen Campbell Moore) is moving them out of London—since he controls their finances and has sole ownership of their house, Mel is unable to stop them from leaving. But something strange happens at the fair: when Jess’s son Frankie (Jax James) sees Rob, he panics and runs away.
Jess and the others find him crying behind a tree, and when Ed hands Betsy to Rob so he can comfort his son, Frankie screams at Rob not to touch the baby. Fighting back tears, Frankie reveals that Rob was the one who hurt Betsy.
Through flashback, we see that Rob came to the family’s house while Jess, overwhelmed by sleep deprivation and peri-natal OCD, left to get medicine, leaving her young children alone at home. Rob is looking for Ed, who typically is home early on Fridays but is still at work, and wants to talk to him about a business opportunity. Frankie tells him Betsy needs to be changed, and he agrees to help. The diapers are upstairs, so Frankie goes to get one, while Rob places Betsy on the changing mat on the kitchen island. While Frankie is out of the room, Rob takes advantage of the opportunity, rummaging through cabinets, finding one of Ed’s credit cards, so he can forge Ed’s signature for a contract. But while he’s doing that, Betsy rolls off the counter and falls to the floor.
Here, Rob reveals his true menacing nature, and convinces Frankie that Betsy’s falling is his fault. After quickly checking her over, he decides Betsy is fine, and tells Frankie that if he tells anyone was there, it could lead to his mother going to jail for child neglect. Horrified, Frankie keeps it all a secret until he can’t hold it back any longer at the fair.
The revelation changes Jess’s world. Throughout Little Disasters, Jess has come to believe that through the stress, anxiety, and peri-natal OCD (a diagnosis inspired by Vaughan’s own experience with having children), she had hurt her own daughter. That, of course, is significantly compounded by Rob letting her, and everyone else, believe that Jess was responsible. “In that moment, there’s a lot of anger towards Rob,” says Kruger. “There’s also a heavy sense of guilt over what her son Frankie has experienced. Even though it’s not specifically said, it’s suggested that he’s on the spectrum, and to put what Rob did on Frankie is terrible. It’s just the worst thing, but while Jess is processing that, there’s also this relief that she’s going to get her life back.”
Jo Joyner and Diane Kruger in Little Disasters Kristóf Galgóczi Németh—Roughcut/Paramount Global
The meaning behind the twist in Little Disasters
This twist marks a significant break from the original book. Though it’s Rob who is responsible for hurting Betsy in the series, the book had a different culprit in Jess’s friend Charlotte. In the novel, Charlotte is deeply jealous of Jess and her picture-perfect life, while Charlotte is struggling with unsuccessful IVF. Knowing Jess is at home with the kids, Charlotte wants to “tell Jess how lucky she is,” as Vaughan explains. Similarly to the series, when Charlotte arrives, Jess is out getting medicine for her kids. When Charlotte picks Betsy up to change her diaper, an altercation occurs as Frankie pushes her. Shocked, she drops Betsy, and, in a panic, blames Frankie, not unlike Rob in the show.
Vaughan says that the show producers suggested the change in bringing the story to screen. “The reason RoughCut didn’t want Charlotte to be responsible was they felt it was unrealistic,” she says. “I think there’s an interesting double standard about men and women in this, but they found it hard to believe that a woman would leave a baby that had been harmed.”
While Charlotte’s motivations were rooted in jealousy, in the series, Rob is motivated by money. “Rob’s got a massive chip on his shoulder,” says Duke. “He’s not earning as much as the other dads and the other families. He’s constantly hitting his friends up for investment money, going around, and trying to get contracts signed. He never hides who he is. We all have friends who take things too far, and he’s that kind of a-hole everyone knows. But what’s brilliant is that’s actually a foil, a kind of camouflage for him being so monstrously awful, so that when he pressures Frankie, he moves into a properly horrific territory. He’s so destructive and damaging that you don’t see it coming, because you think Rob’s the kind of guy that you know.”
As Duke explains, there were various iterations of the reveal that Rob hurt Betsy. “Originally, we had a scene early in Episode 6, where Frankie admits to Betsy falling, but he omits Rob’s presence. You would effectively see the incident twice and see the baby fall twice, which is a lot to ask of the audience. And we felt that that early reveal was sucking the energy out of the later reveal, so we held back.”
After Frankie tells the truth and exposes Rob as the one who hurt Betsy, Liz makes the call to the police. “It’s a deliberate choice that Liz is the one who makes the call, because I wanted to have that circular moment,” says Duke. “It’s for the right reasons, and there are going to be difficult repercussions as a result, but Liz is so consistent in that way. It was important to me that we capture that bookending for her.”
Ultimately, Jess gets her life and children back. One year after the discovery of what Rob did to Betsy, Jess and her friends gather with their children at the park. But Jess seems uneasy. Through voiceover, she tells us: “Sometimes, we get it so right. And in those moments, whatever you do, hold on tight. Because in the blink of an eye, it can all be taken away,” and as Jess holds Betsy, the finale cuts to black.
“For Jess, there’s an awareness that anything could change in a second,” says Kruger. A moment of absence or lack of attention can change someone’s life. And to me, that’s true for everyone, right?”
