Ah, the first week of university. Leave home, make friends, forge a new identity and, if you’re the main character in US drama import Tell Me Lies, become the heroine in a disappointing erotic thriller. There’s no formative experience like it.
We plonk our rucksacks down at the fictional Baird College, a verdant institution full of kids from posh, dull places in upstate New York. That she is just another pampered, beautiful dreamer is one of the negging digs thrown at freshman student Lucy (Grace Van Patten) by mercurial senior Stephen (Jackson White), who corners her on the stairs at a day-one frat-house party with the opening line: “You look really uncomfortable in that dress.” Lucy, unsure of herself in this intimidating new environment, has indeed borrowed a restrictive, strappy thing for the occasion.
By the end of a conversation in which Stephen pushes his face closer and closer to hers as he sips from a red cup and doles out his mildly dangerous older-man observations, he has her in his grasp. She loves him, she hates him, she’ll spend the next nine episodes destructively infatuated with him. A flash-forward to several years later sees Lucy, outwardly now a steady adult, stiff with nerves at the prospect of a friend’s wedding, because Stephen is attending.
In its depiction of a first romantic entanglement overwhelming a green protagonist, Tell Me Lies treads near the territory so delicately mapped out by Normal People. But where that masterpiece kept its focus on two people’s tender desire to take care of each other – based on a connection, formed as their personalities were forming – Tell Me Lies is a soapy, flimsy affair, its central relationship one between an enigmatic manipulator and a helpless poppet.
Much of it is based on sex, which here is explicit in the sense of there being nudity, but without sophistication or complexity in how it affects the people involved. Lucy does not know what she is doing: the level is set the first time she and Stephen get naked, when he wows her by giving her an orgasm, something her high-school boyfriend never managed. From there, the relationship is a basic impression of a toxic obsession, which often features Lucy continuing to indulge Stephen for reasons that are unclear – at least to viewers who aren’t as impressed as she is by the boozy, gossipy campus lifestyle, or indeed by a man who breaks down your defences by alternating between aggressive shouting and pained staring before whipping off his T-shirt.
Tell Me Lies does touch on the disaffection felt by older teenagers who have access to grownup pleasures, but don’t know what to do with them because they don’t know who they are yet. It is aware of how this stage of life can cause mental health issues to turn from a murmur to a scream when young adults are suddenly left to look after themselves. But because it isn’t sure whether it’s a show about kids making mistakes or glamorous upstarts living an aspirational fantasy, the underlying reasons for Lucy and Stephen’s erratic behaviour – they both have difficult mothers and absent fathers – come across as more of an excuse than an explanation, particularly in the deceitful Stephen’s case. His other squeeze is his ex, Diana (Alicia Crowder), who, like him, is a senior and is painted as a wiser woman who can see through his scheming and has some plans of her own, although they seem to mainly involve taking her clothes off whenever Stephen’s around.
If it’s not always obvious whether the naivety of the female characters is by accident or design, that’s because the series is preoccupied with boiling up a pulpy stew of secrets it can snack on if the story lags. The death in the opening episode of one of Lucy’s college pals echoes more and more loudly as the rest of the tale unravels, making the show partly a relationship drama, partly a psychological thriller about a man who might be damaged goods or might simply be a bastard, and partly a saga about a group of cocky college kids to whom a bad thing happens.
We keep skimming over one element to get back to another, creating the sort of show that might work as a low-impact binge, but is more likely one where you watch the first couple of episodes to get the idea, then idly skip to the final chapter to find out the ending. The whole season, which was already available via Disney+, is now on iPlayer, so that option is there, but the denouement is as underdeveloped as what’s come before. This is kids’ stuff.
• Tell Me Lies is on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ in Australia
