‘Tell Me Lies’ Season 1 Refresher & What We Know About Season 2
Tell us the truth: Are you addicted to Tell Me Lies? Then you, like the Hulu drama’s many other fans, must be eagerly awaiting Season 2.
Based on the novel of the same name by Carola Lovering, Tell Me Lies covers the relationship between college students Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White) and how it upends the lives of their friends — especially the one friend who’s carrying a deadly secret.
As the cast and crew get to work on Season 2, check out this recap of Season 1 and see what we already know about the forthcoming episodes.
What happened in Season 1
Freshman Lucy and junior Stephen meet during Welcome Week at Baird College in September 2007. He asks her out, but before they can have a proper date, Lucy’s roommate, Macy (Lily McInerny), is killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, Stephen reconnects with ex-girlfriend Diana (Alicia Crowder) and learns Drew (Benjamin Wadsworth), the younger brother of his friend Wrigley (Spencer House), was present for the car crash that killed Macy. Stephen tells Lucy’s friend Pippa (Sonia Mena) that.
Meanwhile, he and Lucy talk about exclusivity, and yet Lucy hooks up with a bartender, and Stephen talks to Diana, below, about them getting back together. And we see Stephen looking at intimate photos of Macy, suggesting they, too, had intimate relationship.
Josh Stringer/Hulu
As Lucy begins to suspect that Stephen is seeing other people, her friend Bree (Catherine Missal) connects with Evan (Branden Cook), Stephen’s roommate and Bree’s future fiancé.
Over Christmas break, we see Stephen and Lucy’s complicated home lives. His mother is unstable, while hers is stable but secretive. In fact, Lucy believes hers was cheating on her dying father. And after a memorial for Macy, Lucy finds that Macy had a drawing of a flower that looked similar to one Stephen gave Lucy.
As the next semester starts, Lucy confronts Stephen about Macy, and he confesses that they were friends with benefits, he was in the car when she died, and Drew was behind the hit-and-run. Stephen also breaks things off with Diana again, saying that he’s not over her years-old dalliance with Wrigley.
Hulu
At a weekend getaway at a lake house, Evan accidentally lets slip to the friend group that Bree grew up in the foster system, but that flub doesn’t matter much — they still hook up. Meanwhile, Lucy thinks about telling Macy’s parents that Drew was the hit-and-run driver.
Pippa, despite her romantic relationship with Wrigley, ends up making out with Charlie (Zoe Renee), Lucy’s new roommate. Meanwhile, Lucy and Stephen bicker about Diana — who was at the “I love you” stage with Stephen during their relationship, as Lucy learns — and about Wrigley and Drew — who seem to be suffering no consequences from the hit-and-run coverup. Lucy eventually drops an anonymous note about the crash in the dean’s mailbox.
The school launches an investigation into Macy’s death, and a paranoid Drew asks Stephen if Stephen told anyone else about Drew’s involvement. Stephen doesn’t say he told Lucy and instead suggests Pippa was the snitch. Lucy does her fair share of lying, though, offering an alibi for Stephen by saying he was with her the night Macy died. Lucy tearfully confesses to Stephen that she wrote the letter… and he tells her he loves her?
In a season-finale flashback to Macy’s death, we see that Stephen and Macy had a booty call that fateful night and he was the one driving Macy’s car during the accident. Stephen hid his involvement by putting Macy’s body in the driver’s seat and deleting their text messages.
Josh Stringer/Hulu
In the present, Lucy sees Stephen reconnecting yet again with Diana after Diana offers him career help, so Lucy spends the night with Evan, pictured above. And since Stephen still resents Wrigley for sleeping with Diana way back when, he lets Wrigley believe Pippa wrote the letter.
And in the future, at Evan and Bree’s engagement party, we see that Stephen is engaged to Lydia (Natalee Linez), Lucy’s best friend from high school.
What’s in store for Season 2
John P. Fleenor/Netflix
Hulu renewed Tell Me Lies for a second season in November 2022, and production has ramped up in recent months. This January, Tom Ellis (pictured in Lucifer above) was cast in the series-regular role of a Baird professor named Oliver, whose “tough love attitude makes him an intimidating presence that isn’t appreciated by all students” and whose “influence will have chaotic repercussions” for one of the students, per Deadline.
Jace Downs/The CW
And earlier this month, Gossip Girl alum Thomas Doherty (pictured in Legacies above) signed on to play a Baird junior named Leo, who becomes drawn to Lucy after returning from a year abroad — and, of course, entrenched in Lucy and Stephen’s drama — as Deadline reported.
Showrunner Meghan Oppenheimer — Ellis’ wife! — gave fans some teases about Season 2 in an October 2022 interview with TVLine — saying, for example, that there’s more Lucy–Stephen story to explore between their apparent breakup at the end of Lucy’s freshman year and their reunion at Evan and Bree’s engagement party.
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And while Oppenheimer said “there will be some revenge plots in Season 2,” it’s not a given that Lucy will risk the “social annihilation” of exposing Stephen’s secrets, especially considering how she lied to cover for him.
As for the other party in the hit-and-run, viewers will find out what happens to Drew and why he’s “no longer in the picture” by the time of the engagement party, Oppenheimer said. And another flash-forward reveal that could be explained in Season 2 is why Lucy and Pippa have tension in the future.
In fact, Oppenheimer wants to see “a lot more” of the supporting players. “A lot more Bree, a lot more of Evan, a lot more of Pippa and Wrigley,” she said.
Of course, that might not be good news for those characters: Given Lucy and Stephen’s toxicity, we can only assume anyone who gets too close to them in Season 2 will fall victim to their poison.
Tell Me Lies, Season 2, TBD, Hulu
