‘Tell Me Lies’: Did New Hulu Drama Intrigue You Enough to Keep Watching? (POLL)
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the first three episodes of Tell Me Lies, “Lightning Strikes,” “Hot-Blooded,” and “We Don’t Touch, We Collide.”]
Tell Me Lies, over its first three episodes (which dropped on premiere day, September 7), introduces Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and her tumultuous relationship with Stephen (Jackson White), the friends she meets with at college (and stays in touch with), and a tragic event that kicks off her freshman year.
The premiere, after flashes of Lucy and Stephen’s relationship that suggest its rocky nature before we even see the beginnings (“you don’t hate me,” “do you still love me?”), begins in June 2015, with her going to her friend Bree’s (Catherine Missal) engagement party. Lucy insists she’s fine with Stephen attending, and Pippa (Sonia Mena) remarks, “I really hope you can avoid going down the whole Stephen rabbit hole today.” Lucy insists she can handle seeing him, but from what we see of this timeline in these first three episodes, when the two finally do talk at that party? It’s probably going to be a heavy, explosive conversation. (It’ll probably be a good thing that Lucy’s boyfriend Max didn’t join her.)
Eight years earlier, Lucy broke up with her high school boyfriend before heading off to college, where she met Bree, Pippa, and her roommate Macy. The four head off to a party, via an invite from Pippa’s “first semester guy,” Wrigley (Spencer House). It’s at this party that Lucy and Stephen talk to the first time, and it begins with him commenting that she looks uncomfortable in her dress and leads to him remarking that the first time a person is changed after the first time having good sex. The next day, Lucy tells the girls that he was cute while she was talking to him but admits she’s not so sure without him in front of her. It’s foreshadowing things to come: He’s charming at first, but then things unravel.
But we can already see how having Stephen in her life changes Lucy. She steps aside to take his call just as Macy confides in her that, like Lucy said the night before, she knows what it means to have trouble getting excited about stuff, and has a secret to tell her. Then, after her mom leaves her a voicemail that her father would hate them fighting, Lucy brushes off Macy’s invite to a party and snaps at her. Macy goes out on her own, and the next day, Lucy learns that she died crashing into a tree after the party the night before.
Courtesy of Hulu
After that, Wrigley’s younger brother, Drew (Benjamin Wadsworth), who seemed into Bree starts ignoring her. As the audience, Wrigley, Stephen, and eventually Pippa learn, it’s because he was driving that night and swerved to avoid Macy’s car. He saw her crash into the tree but didn’t call for help, and the guilt really starts to eat away at him. As a result, that affects Wrigley, who, in June 2015, is high; Evan (Branden Cook) reminds them it was Drew’s birthday the day before.
Stephen taking care of Lucy after finding her throwing up at a party following Macy’s death leads to the beginning of their relationship, starting with a kiss the next morning, then dinner, then sex — after Lucy realizes his ex-girlfriend Diana (Alicia Crowder) is nice. But what Stephen’s not telling her is that things with Diana are very much not over. In fact, he keeps going back to her, promises he won’t cheat again, loves her, and doesn’t want to be with anyone else, and agrees to take things slow before becoming official again.
Key lines to describe Stephen (he tells his roommate “I don’t beg, I persuade” and Diana remarks that he doesn’t know how to be alone) and his and Lucy’s relationship (“part of me genuinely does not give a s**t and the other part of me wants to drag my nails across his face,” she tells Bree and Pippa) come in the second episode.
Neither tries to get the other one to be exclusive, though Stephen says he’s not sleeping with anyone else after he tries offering Lucy a hair tie that’s not hers. She, on the other hand, does sleep with someone else (Max) when she and Bree aren’t invited to a party Pippa is (and Stephen attends).
But what isn’t revealed until the final moments of the third episode is that Stephen and Macy weren’t just from the same hometown; he has intimate photos of her on his computer, suggesting they knew each other quite well.
So what did you think of the first three episodes of the new Hulu drama? Will you keep watching? Let us know in the poll below.
Tell Me Lies, Wednesdays, Hulu
