Tell Me Lies has always felt uncomfortably real, and that’s because it kind of is — both on the page and in the show. Between Carola Lovering mining her own “terrible relationship” and showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer pulling from people she’s actually known, the whole thing sits in that fun little overlap between fiction and ‘oh god, I’ve dated that man’.
When we spoke, Meaghan was pretty upfront that she didn’t invent these people in a vacuum. “I pulled on people in my own life for the most part,” she told PEDESTRIAN.TV.
With Stephen (Jackson White) in particular, she said, “I think unfortunately [I] have known a couple people like that and have seen a lot of friends in similar relationships. So I was pulling on that a lot.”
That tracks, because unfortunately Stephen doesn’t feel like a cartoon villain; he feels like the guy your friends warned you about, you ignored them, and then six months later you’re crying in a bathroom at a house party wondering how you got here.
Lucy (Grace Van Patten), on the other hand, is stitched together from a different kind of familiarity. Meaghan told me, “With Lucy, I think I’ve been in similar situation — not with someone like Stephen, but I know what it feels like to be with someone that’s not good for you and not be able to walk away from it.”
Unfortunately if you date men you probably also have a Stephen, almost had a Stephen, or were one bad decision away from one, ‘cos same.
And then there’s the book, which is doing its own version of fiction crossing over with reality. Carola has written about the real relationship that inspired the novel in The Cut, explaining that her own Stephen started pursuing her at a college party with an “unabashed, almost manic” intensity that made her “obsessed with the feeling of being wanted”.
She admitted that she originally told readers Stephen was “purely fictional” because she didn’t want to “publicly rehash” such a toxic time in her life, but later said, “I can’t stand to see or imagine the look on readers’ faces when I tell them that it’s all just fiction.”
The key for her is the nuance: “While there is certainly a person who inspired his character, that person isn’t actually the character.” So yes, the book is fiction, but the emotional damage? Extremely non‑fiction.
Of course though if you’re building a show about messy people doing terrible things to each other, reality TV is going to sneak in. When I asked about other influences, Meaghan said, “I’m constantly inspired by little things — certainly Vanderpump Rules, you know? That’s one of the greatest shows of all time, and so that was always fun to watch while we were making the show.”
She accurately said “it’s like the Succession of reality TV, I think. A masterpiece”.
That actually makes a lot of sense — Tell Me Lies basically treats this friend group like a Bravo cast: emotionally stunted, weirdly charismatic, and absolutely incapable of making one healthy decision in a row. No wonder I’m obsessed.
All up, Tell Me Lies ends up feeling like a collage: Carola’s real experiences, Meaghan’s real memories, a sprinkle of Vanderpump Rules chaos, and then a big layer of fiction laid over the top to make it watchable rather than traumatising. And thank god for it!
The first three episode of Tell Me Lies season three are on Disney+ now for you to sink your teeth into!
The post Tell Me Lies’ Showrunner Says Vanderpump Rules & Real Exes Helped Build Stephen & Lucy appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
