When Variety reported in 2015 that HBO was adapting Liane Moriarty's best-selling novel "Big Little Lies," starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, and Zoë Kravitz, the expectations could not have been higher.

And when it premiered in 2017, it lived up to all of them. The cast had amazing chemistry, the story was well-paced and sufficiently ominous, and the soundtrack was superb.

When "Big Little Lies" won multiple Emmys in the limited-series category, it became clear that there were no plans to artificially extend the story past what Moriarty had written in the book.

But two years later, we were back in Monterey. Even though season two gave us Meryl Streep's screaming, "Big Little Lies" should've stayed a limited series.

Hollywood, stop doing this! If your show was based on a single book, it almost never pays off to extend the story — there's a reason the author didn't write a sequel.

It remains to be seen if the long-threatened third season will actually happen.