Something to know about TV ratings is that for some reason, a lot of people watch bad television shows. I’m not talking about fun to hate reality shows like Love Island or The Bachelor, but rather boring stories with flat characters that ultimately lead to an uninteresting or lackluster conclusion. Not everything can be Breaking Bad or The Wire, but in the wake of streaming, there’s just a lot of slop to sift through if you’re looking for something halfway decent.
I say all this to say I went into We Were Liars with tempered expectations. I knew it was based on a YA novel, and I expected all of the tropes and convoluted twists that genre is known for. I also really enjoyed Rahul Kohli in all of Mike Flanagan’s works, and was excited to see him in a new type of story. I expected a fun twisty little summer mystery, maybe with a love triangle or two.
Instead, We Were Liars is bad to the point where it’s offensive to both new viewers and fans of the source material. It squanders an interesting premise waffling between unearned drama and filler, leaving eight episodes that feel more like a slog than they should with the show’s short length. For the sake of fully explaining why, I will be discussing the show with full spoilers, so consider this your only warning if you want to watch this show blind.
The Story
We Were Liars is based on the novel of the same name by E. Lockhart. The story follows Cadence Sinclair Eastman, a young teenager who is self-described American royalty. She summers on her family’s private island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, where she spends all her time with her two cousins and her best friend Gat. This group causes so much trouble we’re told that the adults nickname them The Liars, hence the show’s title.
Everything is perfect and good until one year when she is found on the beach in the middle of the night, half-naked and concussed. The summer after, Cadence returns to the island having not spoken to her cousins and Gat in a year, and despite knowing what happened, they refuse to tell her. The show follows her during both the summer before and after her accident, as she tries to piece together the memories of what happened to her.
Now, I don’t take any issue with the “main character can’t remember” trope as this can be incredibly compelling when done well. In fact, even as the show declined in quality throughout, my desire to see the story through to its conclusion remained. How the mystery is handled in the story is ridiculous though, as all the other characters already know what happened and the only one left in the dark is Cadence. It feels particularly dumb since for half of the show’s runtime, the only reason we’re given is that “the doctor says it would be best for her to remember on her own” which feels cheap and silly given the circumstances. At the halfway point, they switch to the idea that she’s actually been told many times but can’t remember because it’s too traumatic, which isn’t much better.
Apart from the accident, the story mainly follows the relationship between Cadence and Gat, her long-time best friend and her aunt’s boyfriend’s nephew. The speed in which they get together and break up doesn’t leave much room for any longing or soul-searching for either character, and none of their decisions make much sense even in the given context. I believe they break up and get back together three times in the span of eight episodes, but admittedly, I may have missed one.
The rest of the story is largely a family drama between the three sisters, which includes Cadence’s mother, and the family patriarch played by David Morse. The natural progression of character growth and feeling that their stories are overall building towards something is missing though, and the whole of their drama can be described as “some stuff happens then they get over it.”
The Characters
This show has a lot of characters, and it’s a bit of a challenge at first to remember who is related to whom. Cadence is most often accompanied by her two cousins Mirren and Johnny, as well as her best friend and on-and-off boyfriend Gat. Their mothers are Penny (Cadence), Bess (Mirren) and Carrie (Johnny), and Carrie is dating Ed (Gat is his nephew). Following so far? Tipper and Harris are the grandparents and the ones with all the old money prestige. The book version of this story includes a family tree in the opening chapters, which to me is a sign of the author’s palpable lack of trust in their readers.
The characters may be the most frustrating part, because they all sound very interesting on paper. The teen cast spends large portions of the show grappling with their wealth and the systemic racism normalized against Gat and Ed by the adult characters, while the adults deal with the looming threat of being cut off if they don’t perform their correct roles as dictated by Harris. This provides a great set-up for some interesting conversations and character interactions, and a great starting point for conflict among the tight-knit cast.
We don’t get anything from these conflicts though. Instead, we get surface-level conversations amounting to “things are awful and it makes me sad,” never to be discussed again or dealt with in any way with stakes. The wildest scene for me is when Gad, teary-eyed, confides the ongoing stress of being a person of color in white-only spaces and how much it wears on him as a person. He finishes by basically turning to his all-white friends and going “Not you guys though, you guys are fine.” I’m not even going to talk about the scene where Cadence reads Caste to “fix her racism” because my head will explode.
Some Things I Liked
While I really didn’t like this show, it’s certainly not all bad. The performances, for the most part, are solid. I particularly enjoyed Rahul Kohli’s performance as Ed, who brought some much needed humanity to many scenes with more stilted dialogue. David Morse is a great pick for the rich patriarch Harris Sinclair, and brings a real Logan Roy energy to the role that makes the other characters’ fear believable.
When Gat and Cadence first break up because she finds out he’s already dating someone else, I really liked that narrative choice! It was handled with the appropriate amount of anger from Cadence, and was a great jumping off point for both characters to learn and grow from. It goes nowhere but it has potential.
The Ending
There is no way to talk about this show without discussing the ending, because it’s so egregious that it ruins any goodwill or okay feelings that you may have developed through the course of the story. To be honest, if this show didn’t end the way it did, I wouldn’t be writing this review and I would be chalking it up to an okay YA like The Summer I Turned Pretty or Looking for Alaska. Author E. Lockhart said she was inspired by Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in the creation of this story, and … I’ll let you all decide what to make of that. (Last warning for ending spoilers!)
On a noble tirade to end their rich family’s cruelty and racism, they decide to set Grandpa’s mansion on fire. However, because they are not very smart, they set the fire on the first floor while the two cousins Mirren and Johnny are still on the second and third floors. Gat, who notices Cadence is delayed in her evacuation, heads back inside to save her and ends up trapped by the flames. To top it all off, the two family pooches are also trapped! RIP three kids and two dogs. Trauma!
So that’s the ending. The Gat, Mirren and Johnny she’s been chatting with all summer long are figments of her imagination. A large portion of the show’s runtime is spent with these characters chatting with Cadence, especially with Gat who goes as far as transporting her places and having copious amounts of sex with her. It’s fine though because this can all be explained away by her concussion. Which reminds me …
The story of how she ends up concussed and in her underwear is explained away by her body being thrown into the ocean by the explosion of the gas line. This explosion also, somehow, blasts her dress off, leaving her bleeding and half-naked. This scene is downright laughable, and I’m not sure how anyone watching could take this seriously. The dialogue voiceover from Johnny only adds to the comedy, as he informs the audience in a somber tone: “I guess we just weren’t good arsonists.”
In short, I felt cheated by this show. Ironically, its worst parts are the ways it tries to make big sweeping statements on real world issues. It just comes across as tone-deaf and out of touch. At the end of the day though, it’s just a bad half-baked story with a bonkers conclusion that the author had no idea how to foreshadow. The ending clumsily sets up a season two, but hopefully we don’t get one.
