Summary

Tell Me Lies gets even darker in Season 3, which didn’t seem to be possible, but it also turns its gaze inwards at the interior lives of these broken characters to mixed but largely compelling effect.

Tell Me Lies is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen at being truly awful to watch. It’s a car crash – literally in the first season, and figuratively ever since – that isn’t so much enjoyable as bleakly fascinating, the kind of thing you can’t look away from lest you miss a detail that you know you don’t really want to see but kind of have to, for reasons you can’t necessarily articulate. This is as true about Season 3 – if not truer – than it has been about any other season, but this latest outing is also darker, if that’s possible, and more interested in the bleak interiority of its characters. In lacking some of the saucy sensationalism, it’s the most intriguing, uncomfortable run yet, and watching it is often, by design, deeply unpleasant.

Creator Meaghan Oppenheimer knows this. She must, since every angle knitting together the show’s two timelines – 2015, at the wedding of Bree and Evan, and 2009, as the students at Baird College return to campus after the Christmas break – is designed for maximum tension and dysfunction. The web is so twisted by this point that it can be difficult to keep track of, but you’re never not aware that the spiders are lurking all over it. It’s just figuring out who the flies are.

In the Season 2 finale, Stephen (Jackson White, playing what I earnestly believe might be the most deplorable character on television) had pulled off a Machiavellian scheme to ruin Bree (Cat Missal) and Evan’s (Branden Cook) wedding by exposing that, back in 2008, Evan slept with Bree’s best friend Lucy (Grace Van Patten) in a one-night stand. This is where Season 3 picks up, but it’s in no hurry to reveal what happens beyond the exchange of vows. In fact, for a while, we don’t even check in with the 2015 timeline at all.

Instead, we’re occupied by the various goings-on at college, themselves informed by all the terrible stuff that happened last season. Wrigley (Spencer House) and Pippa (Sonia Mena) are now officially back together, but the former continues to grapple with Drew’s death while the latter continues to explore a burgeoning romantic connection with Diana (Alicia Crowder). Lucy and Stephen are back together, much to the obvious chagrin of all of Lucy’s friends, but she’s convinced that he can no longer do anything to surprise her and that this time things will be different – two claims that are, predictably, proved wrong in record time.

Bree is still largely focused on the fallout from her affair with married professor Oliver (Tom Ellis), who is up to his old tricks again this season, and Evan is trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life and what that life might look like without Bree in it. It’s a lot to be going on with, and the season’s plot is quickly complicated when Lucy, through rather sickening circumstances, is forced to wrestle with her well-intentioned claim that she was sexually assaulted by Chris (Jacob Rodriguez), the brother of Lucy’s former best friend Lydia, who, in the 2015 timeline, is engaged to Stephen.

You don’t need me to tell you that this is a mess. But the masterstroke of Tell Me Lies Season 3 is that everyone seems to have realised it is. Everyone has now stopped pretending that Lucy’s relationship with Stephen is anything other than a disastrous trauma bond, so when it inevitably falls apart after one episode, and they get back to psychotically trying to ruin one another, it has a different vibe. Lucy is beginning to realise that she can be without Stephen, or at least be supported in staying away from him, but this space also gives her the opportunity to interrogate why she’s so repeatedly drawn to him. Most of her arc involves a grim relationship with new character Alex (Costa D’Angelo), a drug dealer who also happens to be Bree’s foster brother, but the reason it’s compelling is because it directly examines what has always been the most interesting aspect of Lucy’s character – that the darker impulses she so consistently exhibits might not just be a trauma response to Stephen’s abuse, but innate characteristics that make her more similar to him than she’d ever like to admit.

The growth of Lucy and everyone around her backfoots Stephen, who is no longer getting away with the subtler, more charming manipulation he’s known for and instead has to enter full-on, mustache-twirling evil villain mode, with little to no pretence involved. Stephen is a truly despicable character, even more deplorable here since the opportunity to finally examine his circumstances and his actions only causes him to double down on being terrible. Jackson White has less to play here, but the character is more effectively repulsive than ever.

But Tell Me Lies Season 3 also shifts the focus away from just Stephen and Lucy, giving plenty of time to developing threads elsewhere. Pippa and Diana’s burgeoning relationship is pretty nicely handled, thriving on easy chemistry and fumbling steps into new territory, while Bree’s semi-psychotic fixation on Oliver is tempered by more self-awareness than Lucy has ever shown – she often tells her friends what she’s thinking and what she’s up to, which is at least something – and a really sweet relationship with Wrigley, who feels isolated among both his friends and family following Drew’s death, which he understandably feels culpable for. Wrigley remains my favourite character, a really neat subversion of the jock archetype, and Spencer House delivers his best performances of the series here.

The show’s approach to bigger, more systemic issues is mixed, but then again, it always is. I feel that’s forgivable in this context, though, since the drama revolves around how those issues are filtered through the specific, often demented perspectives of the individual characters, so the morality is flexible and situational. The point is that it’s supposed to be uncomfortable to watch, and it is indeed extremely uncomfortable to watch. On that level, at least, Tell Me Lies remains a major success, but now it’s becoming more curious about the root causes of that discomfort, it’s making an even bolder claim for itself.

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