Critic Reviews
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Tell Me Lies is too nuanced for soapboxing and too empathetic for handwringing. At the same time, it’s also clear-eyed about the ugly attitudes giving cover to these relationships, the personal decisions or shortcomings that allow them to flower, and the damage they leave behind. It’s a guilty pleasure in the truest sense — one whose juicy delights are tempered with enough sharp reality to make it stick, just a little, in the throat.
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“Tell Me Lies” is at its strongest when it hones in on the thrill and danger of new passions in a new environment. It moves at the pace of a bygone supersized network season, not rushed to hop between major milestones in a campus year and instead living inside the gradual build of new relationships that could be great or terrible (or both).
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While “Tell Me Lies” isn’t as complex as “Normal People,” a fascinating look at similar changes, it does hold interest, particularly since all of the students have plenty of time to dabble in things that don’t require a paper at the end of the term.
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I wouldn’t have faulted Tell Me Lies for engaging in a pure smut approach for the series, if that was its only endgame. But Tell Me Lies attempts to go deeper, making stabs at developing out their characters’ familial backstories for sympathetic audience approval, complicating its blunt eroticism.
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Thankfully, Van Patten is a charming presence throughout, and her chemistry with White is palpable. While there is no Team Stephen in this scenario, there is enough about the first half of “Tell Me Lies” to ensure this tale of betrayal is one I want to graduate from.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 3
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Mixed: 1 out of 3
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Negative: 0 out of 3
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Sep 18, 2022
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Sep 12, 2022