Whatever attracted you to Big Little Lies won't be what you ultimately remember it for. The HBO mini-series, which is drawing a record-breaking cumulative audience for Foxtel, is a stealth operation in flamboyantly open view. It's brash, funny, subversive, bittersweet, and heartbreaking, like a season of The Real Housewives rewritten by Todd Haynes and then performed by a cadre of talented actresses each, in their distinctive way, holding nothing back.

Adapted by the prolific but not always authentic David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal), Australian author Liane Moriarty's novel has been transplanted from Sydney's northern beaches to the wealthy enclave of California's Monterey, but its appreciation of the complex and sometimes cruel lives women can find themselves leading – where satisfaction is forever fleeting and struggle, even against yourself, can be eternal – is equally relevant.

(From left) Reece Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Nicole Kidman star in Big Little Lies, a mini-series that explores the complex and sometimes cruel lives women can find themselves leading.

The show's lead flamethrower is Reese Witherspoon's Madeline Mackenzie. "I love my grudges," she happily admits, "I tend to them like little pets." And whether it's confronting her rival for the local primary school's rule, Renata Klein (Laura Dern), fighting for the local theatre company's right to stage Avenue Q, or managing the younger second wife, Bonnie Carlson (Zoe Kravitz), of her first husband, Nathan (James Tupper), Madeline is fearsome, a feisty pleasure.

But the character is never merely her rude rejoinders or undeterred comments. From the first of the seven episodes she's also vulnerable to the dismissive analysis of her 16-year-old daughter, Abigail (Kathryn Newton), who calls her mother a "space alien" for her officious, overzealous ways. Early on Madeline repeatedly can't make it through dinner without walking out to the neighbouring beachside, and when the two do genuinely converse their relationship is revealed as something vulnerable and uncertain.