Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tell Me Lies’ On Hulu, A Pulpy Drama About A Tumultuous 8-Year Relationship

When you have to deal with toxic people in your life — or you’ve managed to separate from them in order to improve your life — do you want to see them on TV? Maybe one or two; after all, there needs to be some tension and conflict for the main character to bounce off of. But what if every character in a series is toxic to some degree or another? Would you consider that a pleasurable viewing experience? A new drama on Hulu challenges its viewers to find out.

TELL ME LIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of the eye of a young woman. As we pan back, we see she’s in bed with a man. The man wakes up and the two of them make love.

The Gist: It’s 2015, and Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) is having daydreams about the passionate sex she had with her ex-boyfriend Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), even as she’s in bed with her current beau. She’s off to an engagement party for her friend Bree (Catherine Missal), and she’s not looking forward to running into Stephen there, four years after they broke up. Her buddy Pippa (Sonia Mena) tells her to not to spiral, and their other college buddy Wrigley (Spencer House) arrives to the luncheon coked up.

But once she locks eyes on Stephen, we go back 8 years, to when Lucy breaks up with her high school boyfriend the day before she leaves for Baird College. She seems to do so without much emotion, and her mom CJ (Jessica Capshaw) is shocked. But the two of them have had a very strained relationship since Lucy’s father died; she blames her mother for his death, though she doesn’t want to talk about why. She meets Pippa, Bree and her roommate Macie (Lily McInerny), and all four of them hit it off right from the start.

Pippa is already dating Wrigley — they met when she visited campus earlier in the year — so all four go to his fraternity for a welcome-week party. One of the girls there is disgusted that they invited all freshmen girls and she tells Lucy that she’s there to see what her ex is doing. This is when she meets Stephen, and he calls his brand of DGAF charm “very polarizing.” Over the next couple of days, he proposes that they go out for a legitimate date, and she’s absolutely intrigued.

But the real bonding moment between the two is when a tragedy happens, and he helps get Lucy through the first night after that tragedy. Little does Lucy know that Stephen is up to other things when he’s not around her.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tell Me Lies has the pulpy feel of Pretty Little Liars; showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer used a similar tone on her other series, Queen America.

Our Take: Tell Me Lies, based on Carola Lovering’s novel, is wildly off-putting, mainly because the personalities of every character on the series are toxic. Supposed old friends act like general jerks to each other, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of warmth or empathy between them, and everyone seems to be out for themselves. We look at the beginning of what’s supposed to be a very tumultuous eight-year relationship between Lucy and Stephen and we couldn’t care less about whether we see the two of them together or not.

That would be all well and good if the idea behind the show were more closed-ended. Yet the premise is that we’re going to examine the breadth of this relationship, from when they met through to that moment when they see each other at the engagement party and beyond. There’s lots of potential for flipping back and forth in time, where we see more examples of just how bad Lucy and Stephen are for each other while they have some exciting sexual chemistry that keeps them in each other’s orbits.

But, by the end of the first episode, we can see that Stephen is the dick that he unabashedly portrays himself as during his first meeting with Lucy; after all, he professes his love to his ex Diana (Alicia Crowder) not long after coming close to getting in Lucy’s pants after their night together. So we’re supposed to go along this ride with the two of them, likely breaking up and getting together multiple times and being utterly bad for each other. Can’t wait?

It doesn’t help that the supporting characters, like the drunken Wrigley, his younger brother Drew (Benjamin Wadsworth), snarky Pippa, and prissy Bree get stories of their own, and they’ll likely also be problematic. It just feels like a whole series full of toxic, near-narcissistic characters that aren’t murdering each other. We don’t want to spend our precious time on earth with people like that in real life, much less filling the cast of a young adult drama.

Sex and Skin: There’s sex scenes in the first episode, but not a lot of nudity.

Parting Shot: As a slowed-down version of “Addicted to Love” plays, we see intercuts of 2007 Stephen and Lucy meeting for their date and 2015 Stephen and Lucy locking eyes at the engagement party.

Sleeper Star: If anyone embodies the toxicity of their character well, it’s Sonia Mena as Pippa. In fact, all of the acting performances on the show are good, and almost make the characters watchable despite their reprehensible natures.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I am in college now; I don’t need to impress anyone anymore,” Lucy says to her mom. Uh, she’s going to be in for a hell of a surprise, isn’t she?

Our Call: SKIP IT. While Tell Me Lies is a well-acted series, its characters are all pretty much awful people we have no desire to spend time with, especially the two people whose relationship is going to likely repeatedly fall apart over the course of the season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.