Messy first-love series Tell Me Lies is chick-lit for the TV brigade
This latest steamy TV series to take on the theme of bruising first love is slickly written and a welcome addition to our screens.
First love between two hotly attractive young people has populated romance novels, chick lit, rom-coms, movie melodramas and Sally Rooney novels since time began. And the latest TV series to take up the theme is Tell Me Lies, which is indeed a bit like an American, female-centric answer to Rooney’s Normal People, featuring as it does a painfully earnest love between two kindred souls at college who are not quite like the others – not like the simplistic best friends, or mean girls, or dimly good-natured doofuses around them.
This first love is, of course, going to be emotionally bruising, momentous, even, given all the smouldering gazing and other early hints of dark consequences to come. Here we have Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) starting her freshman year at Baird College. She is beautiful but a bit different – emotionally aloof, something that she herself can’t figure out. Oh, how that will change!
Amid the jocks at the boozy freshers week party, she meets Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White) and – guess what? – he’s handsome but a bit different. Oddly forward, too, in telling Lucy how gorgeous but “uncomfortable” she seems in her dress, and making a poor joke about his favourite song being Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which the other jerks wouldn’t have the imagination for.
All this is shown in flashbacks so we know that a four-year relationship will ensue between them with murmured gasps of “don’t hate me … ” during bouts of intense sex. Meaghan Oppenheimer’s series has ambitions, though: this is no Love Story, because it looks set to be a story of toxic behaviour. On the evidence of episode one, the unreadable Stephen is already an inch away from being abysmal. In that very first interaction with Lucy he also speculates on her sex life while standing too close to her, like a persistent male pigeon. The solipsistic Lucy isn’t much better.
Slickly written to unveil lies and shifting perspectives, the series does manage to capture the magnified emotions of that time of life around the turn of your twenties, something that Normal People did so well. Here, though, with events set on a college campus, it can feel closer to an edgier version of The OC. In short, it’s very American, the people are awful and for many it’ll be hopelessly addictive.
Meantime, if we are in the age of peak TV, at the heart of it are movie spin-offs: the prequels (Bates Motel; Andor), the sequels (The Karate Kid; The Exorcist) and the origins stories (Ratched; She-Hulk etc etc). Lazy IP plundering, some might say, but the punters clearly don’t mind.
However, to play with a cult classic is another thing. When it comes to British films you wouldn’t really want anyone to try a Long Good Friday prequel (The Long Good Monday?) or a Withnail and I sequel (Withnail’s Return). Yet that hasn’t stopped Paramount+ going for it with another modern British masterpiece: Sexy Beast, the prequel no one knew they wanted.
You remember Sexy Beast, right? Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 crime movie starring Ray Winstone as Gal Dove, a former gangster retired and roasting in Spain who receives an unwelcome visit from his psychotic former accomplice Don, played by Ben Kingsley. It was funny and unnerving in equal measure, and quite brilliant. The TV series, set in London 10 years before those events, is better than you might think, but inevitably labouring in the shadow of greatness.
Here we have a younger, blond-highlighted Gal (a charismatic James McArdle, with his easy smile), in somewhat better shape than the “loveable lummox” of the film, and in no way reluctant to “do the job”. Then there is Don Logan, played by Emun Elliott (whom you might recognise from Guilt or The Gold), here more of a foot soldier sidekick to Gal the safe-breaker. Is Elliott as terrifying as Kingsley’s staccato-voiced bully was? No one could quite be that, although his hair-trigger temper is suitably volatile, and a meltdown in a restaurant in the second episode certainly has an alarming ferocity.
This being a series, Don’s madness is given a bit more backstory (a troubled childhood, of course), with his harrowing sister (a hatchet-faced Tamsin Greig) turning out to be the inspiration for his psychopathy. “Preparation, preparation,” she utters at him menacingly, in one of several lines harking back to the film.
Gal and Don are soon in way over their heads after they take a job for the villainous big beast Teddy Bass (Ian McShane in the film; here True Blood’s Stephen Moyer, giving a vampiric, narrow-eyed suaveness to a truly horrible role). From there things settle into the usual gangland crime escalations, taking place in shadowy clubs, the backseats of cars and around the pools of Spanish villas – such that you’re almost surprised that Danny Dyer doesn’t show up. The side-story of Gal’s blossoming relationship with the ambitious porn star Deedee (Sarah Greene) doesn’t really add much beyond lending a strong female presence to an otherwise very male, very toxic brew.
The kneejerk reaction to all this is to say it isn’t a patch on the film (and it isn’t). But it would be unfair to say the storytelling doesn’t romp along, buoyed by its richly portrayed gargoyles of the English criminal classes. Certainly it’s easy to click to the next episode. As such, it’s a shame when scenes capitulate to cartoonishly sleazy brutality (the second episode climax is particularly off-putting). The bigger problem is the loss of the film’s streak of humour. Who can forget Don berating Gal for his tan (“Look at your suntan. It’s like leather … We could make a f––king suitcase out of you. Like a crocodile, fat crocodile, fat bastard”). The film felt like a darkly comic one-off; the TV series feels like just another TV series.
Tell Me Lies, Streaming on Disney Plus
Sexy Beast, streaming on Paramount+