This hit Hulu show just returned for its third season this month, and it’s already on Watch With Us’ January binge list.
Hulu’s original show Tell Me Lies is a scintillating melodrama with relatable themes and a gripping portrait of abuse that has resonated with viewers and hooked them in.
The show stars Grace Van Patten and Jackson White as a couple who meet in college, and we follow their relationship throughout the course of a decade.
We’ve got three big reasons why you should stop what you’re doing and watch Tell Me Lies this January.
It’s a Realistic Look at a Toxic Relationship Without Glorifying it
Tell Me Lies is set in the late 2000s at the fictional Baird College, where our protagonists Lucy Albright (Van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (White) first meet. Over the span of nearly a decade, we follow their relationship as it unfolds through its many ups and downs, consequently leading to a breakup at the end of season 2 and a tentative reunion at the onset of season 3. While the show provides some great escapist melodrama, it also hits home for many viewers. The relationship between Lucy and Stephen isn’t a good one — in fact, it’s extremely unhealthy.
Both fans and critics alike have felt that Tell Me Lies is a very necessary mainstream portrait of an abusive relationship. However, there is a lack of clarity when it comes to Stephen, which only enhances the emotional power of the show; he isn’t necessarily evil, and his character is morally ambiguous in a way that feels true to how real people are. Instead of glorifying a bad relationship the way some pop culture is wont to do, Tell Me Lies instead depicts with raw honesty the narcissism and manipulative abuse that are ugly, but difficult to look away from, compounding minor infractions until we’re all steeped in the noxiousness of Stephen and Lucy’s dynamic.
It Captures College Culture With Drama and Empathy
In addition to the partying and the heterosexual hookup culture specific to the time period of the mid-2000s, Tell Me Lies is adept at portraying the academic and relationship stresses of college that fans find extremely relatable. Sometimes, the show may seem a little too dramatic and chaotic, but for many, that is exactly what their undergrad experience was like. The stresses are all the more burdensome, the romances are all the more intense and the toxicity that is nurtured by the college environment is on full display in Tell Me Lies.
Ultimately, it’s this toxic environment and hookup culture that feels especially pertinent to the nature of Stephen and Lucy’s relationship. When Stephen and Lucy meet one another in the show’s first episode, Stephen is negging Lucy at a frat party — this interaction operates as an unfortunate portent of their relationship to come. While the series showcases the liberating sexual freedom that young, college-age women experienced during this time — the “no-strings-attached” sexual encounters — it is also honest about how these “casual” encounters could manage to inform genuine intimacy.
The Characters Are Layered, Complex and Flawed
As mentioned before, while Stephen is narcissistic and emotionally abusive towards Lucy, nothing is black and white in Tell Me Lies. Nobody in the show is an easy-to-pin-down archetype, and characters are complex, flawed and feel incredibly human. By making the characters contradictory, it only makes them more compelling — it also makes them feel more real. All characters, even Stephen, have struggles that inform their decisions if not necessarily justify them.
Lucy is, thus, drawn as a woman stuck in the toxic cycle of abusive love, a cycle which many viewers find all too familiar. When Lucy and Stephen meet, she neither has the experience nor the maturity to understand what is happening to her, while Stephen knows how to play her like a fiddle. Plus, with the two of them being so young at the start of their relationship, you can understand why it makes it even harder for Lucy to separate: Stephen entered her life at a formative time, and now it’s all she knows. In Tell Me Lies, you understand how has flaws and how everyone makes bad decisions, and these bad decisions can allow toxicity to bloom in one’s backyard.
Stream Tell Me Lies now on Hulu.
