If you would’ve asked me in high school what my absolute nightmare college experience would be, my answer could never have come close to the living hell that is the life of the unrelentingly toxic friend group — if you could even call them friends — in Hulu’s “Tell Me Lies.”
Over the three season run of this series, each and every character is put through one brutal and life-altering event after another. It makes for entertaining television, but sends a shiver down my spine. Last Tuesday, Feb. 17, the show came to an end, finally letting these characters rest. Or maybe not.
To summarize everything that happens across seasons one and two and the better part of season three would be genuinely impossible. No hyperbole, everything bad you can possibly imagine happening to a person happens to someone in this show — and even worse than you could fathom.
The show, based off a novel of the same title by Carola Lovering (which, for the record, I did read and it is quite literally the least faithful adaptation of a book I have ever personally witnessed, but that’s a conversation for another time) follows Lucy Albright and the friends — again, I would classify this as a loose term — she meets at Baird College.
Lucy’s core friend group, take or leave some extraneous characters that come and go along the way, features Bree, Pippa and her on and off boyfriend Wrigley, Stephen DeMarco, Evan and sometimes Diana. The web of how each of these characters are connected to one another becomes so complicated I couldn’t put it to simple terms if I tried.
What is essential to your understanding of this show is that at the very beginning of her freshman year, Lucy starts dating Stephen, and such is the downfall of the rest of her life. Genuinely. Stephen DeMarco is one of the most terrifying characters of any show I have watched, and not in a classic horror or thriller show type of way. He is psychologically terrifying.
Throughout the series, Lucy and Stephen are in a perpetual cycle of manipulating and hurting each other in any way they possibly can. This all comes to a head in season three. The main plot points of season three are heavily contextually dependent on the prior two seasons, but basically, Stephen has something he is holding over Lucy and it is ruining her life.
Lucy’s life is consumed by Stephen in every sense of the word. Everything she does is in some way a response to what Stephen has done to her and what she is afraid he might do next. A lot of the time, her actions don’t make sense, and this is where a lot of the criticisms of this show come into play. Fans of the show have been expressing their frustrations with Lucy, saying things like “I can no longer defend her after she …” fill in the blank with her latest irrational decision.
It’s really easy to think this. Trust me, that mindset had me for the first couple episodes of this latest season. But underneath that, Lucy has been severely emotionally abused since she was 18 years old by someone she is — no matter how stupid it may seem — in love with. That does something irrevocable to a person’s psyche.
With that being said, I do take issue with season three for multiple reasons. If you sense my vagueness, it’s because I truly couldn’t keep track of all of the plot points happening in this season. It all felt so rushed — almost as if they intended on keeping the show going for a fourth season but a higher-up at Hulu cut them off.
Season three calls back to the very beginning of the show, where we can see the whole friend group reunited as Bree and Evan are about to get married. This becomes a throughline during the entire show, as moments during the wedding weekend trigger flashbacks to the college-years timeline. Season three throws several wrenches into the concept of Bree and Evan getting married, including the best plot of the whole season — Bree and Wrigley’s yearning and pining over each other.
The finale attempts to tie together all of the loose ends of not only the season, but the entire show. In many ways, it is successful — we get an answer as to whether or not Bree and Evan are actually going to get married seeing as Bree and Wrigley clearly love each other — but in other ways, it dropped the ball.
It all just felt so rushed and so … anti-climactic? I am hesitant to use that term because if there is anything you can say about this show it’s that it is certainly eventful, but nothing about the finale episode encapsulated that well enough for me. It all kind of made sense, which for any other show would make for a perfect series finale, but for this one, it really doesn’t. We’re still left to wonder about the true state of relations between almost every character. Very confusing, very underwhelming.
Still, I do really love this series and would recommend it to anyone who has the mental bandwidth for watching the world’s worst kind of people try to be friends and in relationships, the lines of which get quite blurry. The finale doesn’t detract from the highlights of this show — top of that list is the genuinely incredible acting from Grace Van Patten and Jackson White as Lucy and Stephen — but it is just slightly disappointing.
3 stars
Featured photo courtesy of @REMmoves, X
