Summary
We Were Liars is generic YA fare with disposable lookalike characters, clunky writing, and overlong episodes.
You know how racists claim not to be able to tell people of colour apart because they all look the same? That’s kind of how I felt about We Were Liars, which is weird because almost the entire cast is white, as am I. But it’s amazing how much three generations of the same wealthy family blend into one in Prime Video’s adaptation of the E. Lockhart novel of the same name. It’s a flurry of blonde hair and waifish features and go-nowhere subplots about boring nonsense, set against the idyllic backdrop of a holiday island where summer seems endless and mysteries are afoot.
The Aryan thing is perhaps why protagonist Cadence Sinclair (Emily Alyn Lind, The Babysitter: Killer Queen) dyes her hair dark after the first episode, which sets the scene by being bookended with foreboding (and torturous) narration. Something happens to Cadence on Beechwood Island, the Sinclairs’ dreamy private island, that leaves her with amnesia and a frosty, distant relationship with her two cousins, Johnny (Joseph Zada) and Mirren (Esther McGregor, Obi-Wan Kenobi), and her love interest, Gat (Shubham Maheshwari). But nobody is willing to talk about what it was. The following summer, a newly brunette Cadence returns to the island for answers, and finds more questions than she bargained for. The hair is like a symbol for no longer being part of the gang.
Maybe there’s something in that. Or maybe, more likely, I’ve now hit an age where pretty young adults all look the same and their problems – coming-of-age, love triangles, burgeoning awareness of the world around them – seem old hat. But even the parents, played by Mamie Gummer (Blood of Zeus), Caitlin FitzGerald (InventingAnna, Succession, Sweetbitter), and Candice King (The Orville), look like twins. It’s an aesthetically believable family with the surprising shared trait of none of them being able to deliver a convincing performance.
We Were Liars ping-pongs between its two timelines while steadily unpacking the mystery of what happened to Cadence and why everyone is lying about it, all while paying lip service to weighty themes like class disparity and morality, and getting tangled in a thicket of go-nowhere subplots about affairs and secrets and the usual rich-people hubbub. But series co-creators Julie Plec (The Girls on the Bus) and Carina Adly Mackenzie seem to have no idea how to make any of it interesting, leading to frustratingly on-the-nose writing, circuitous plotting, and clunky characterisation. At eight hour-long episodes, We Were Liars becomes tedious much earlier than it becomes involving, which only happens right at the very end.
There’s no lack of villainy. The Sinclair family patriarch, Harris (David Morse, The Chair), is a broad caricature of a bigoted old-money mogul, and causes cracks all throughout the family tree by manipulating his adult daughters and looming around his grand-kids like some sort of spectre. In truth, the entire family qualifies as bad guys, because they’re the quintessential pampered princes and princesses who only acknowledge their privilege when the script spots the opportunity for a moral lesson. There’s no depth to the script, though, so any observations feel frustratingly, sometimes ridiculously surface-level.
This is largely thanks to the approach the show takes to its audience stand-in character, Gat, an outsider among the Liars – as they call themselves – by virtue of not being blood related and not being white. But we meet him having just travelled to India and realised, perhaps for the first time, how he and his father Ed (Rahul Kohli, Twilight of the Gods, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Midnight Club) have been treated over the years by Harris and his ilk. But Gat’s sudden social awakening plays out like a gap-year student patronisingly telling his white friends about culture.
The whole show is a bit like that. Every potentially compelling character and angle is reduced to the most arch possible terms, and storytelling shortcuts like hefty music cues and even imagined fireworks going off in the background of a kissing scene are deployed to do the heavy lifting instead of proper writing. I earnestly thought we’d come out on the other side of the YA novel adaptation trend (that said, Prime Video’s own The Summer I Turned Pretty still isn’t over), but We Were Liars capably proves that the genre isn’t running out of road just yet. Yay.
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