And while “Little Fires,” developed by Liz Tigelaar (“Brothers and Sisters,” “Casual”), is staged and edited at a calm, even deliberate, pace, with a variety of melancholy cover versions of peppier ’90s songs, there’s no way to get around the melodramatic core of the material. (Seven episodes were available for review.)

Witherspoon plays Elena Richardson, mother of four and lawyer’s wife in the ur-suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. She also works part-time at the local newspaper — her dreams of a big-city career were scuttled by motherhood — and manages a family rental property, which is how she meets Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), an art photographer, and Mia’s teenage daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood).

Mia and Pearl are constantly on the move, migrating in their beat-up car from city to city, a lifestyle that Mia attributes to her art practice and that the even-tempered, precociously intelligent Pearl grimly tolerates. When they rent Elena’s apartment, a spark is struck — something in Mia and Pearl’s uncompromising bohemianism resonates with Elena’s submerged desire for a different life — and the do-gooder Elena impulsively offers Mia a job as “house manager” for her family, which really means cooking and cleaning.

It’s just the first thing in “Little Fires” that, while it could happen (it probably felt natural in the book), makes you squint at the screen and think, Really? The fiercely proud and cosmopolitan Mia resists, but when Pearl befriends the Richardson children — and is entranced by their comfortable, stable Shaker Heights life — Mia changes her mind, taking the job so that she can keep an eye on her daughter.

It’s an unlikely setup — Mia doesn’t seem like someone who’s going to walk into the kitchen and whip up a tasty meatloaf from the ingredients on hand. And the improbabilities compound themselves in a subplot that becomes the main action of the story, involving an undocumented Chinese waitress (Huang Lu) at the restaurant where Mia works nights, who’s looking for the baby she left outside a firehouse while afflicted with postpartum depression.