When Tell Me Lies premiered on Hulu back in September 2022, it arrived with a promise that felt almost too delicious to resist: a show about the seductive, destructive nature of a relationship built on deception. What unfolded over its first season was nothing short of a masterclass in modern relationship drama, and creator Meaghan Oppenheimer understood something fundamental that many shows miss—audiences don’t just want to watch characters make mistakes; they want to understand why those mistakes feel so inevitable.
The brilliance of Tell Me Lies lies in its refusal to play it safe with traditional narrative structure. By following Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco’s toxic entanglement from the very beginning, the show doesn’t position itself as a cautionary tale delivered from some moral high ground. Instead, it pulls you directly into the magnetic pull of their relationship, making you complicit in their choices. That’s genuinely risky storytelling in an era where audiences often demand clear moral heroes and villains. The 7.5/10 rating reflects something interesting—it’s a show that divided viewers, but that division isn’t weakness. It’s evidence that Tell Me Lies was doing something challenging enough to challenge people.
What makes this show particularly significant is how it’s navigated the landscape of prestige television. Across 26 episodes stretched over three seasons, Oppenheimer and her team have resisted the temptation to bloat the narrative or resort to cheap dramatic turns. Instead, each episode feels deliberately paced, even when the runtime remains somewhat enigmatic. This restraint is what keeps the mystery aspects sharp and the interpersonal drama cutting.
The cultural conversation around Tell Me Lies has been fascinating to watch unfold:
- The normalization of toxic love: The show sparked genuine discussions about why we romanticize relationships that are fundamentally unhealthy, particularly in how media has conditioned us to view obsessive, controlling behavior as romantic
- Lucy’s agency: Audiences became deeply invested in debates about whether Lucy is a victim or an active participant in her own downfall—a question the show deliberately refuses to answer neatly
- The supporting cast’s complexity: Characters like Evan, Pippa, and Diana became beloved in ways that surprised many viewers, forcing reckonings with how we judge people in someone else’s orbit
- The visual storytelling: The show’s non-linear structure and its use of flashbacks to contradict present-day narratives became iconic, influencing how other dramas approached unreliable perspective
> The real genius of Tell Me Lies is that it doesn’t ask you to like Lucy or Stephen—it asks you to understand them, which is so much more complicated.
When Season 3 premiered, the show pulled in 5 million views globally across Disney+ and Hulu within the first seven days. That number tells you something crucial: despite three full seasons of a deeply unsettling relationship playing out, audiences kept coming back. The viewership decline from Season 1’s metrics (304.9) to Season 2’s (237.5) might suggest a show shedding casual viewers, but what remained was a committed, invested audience that needed to know how this story ended. That’s the mark of genuine cultural penetration.
The structural choices Oppenheimer made deserve special attention. By building episodes with an unknown runtime, the show gained flexibility to breathe when it needed to and cut when it needed to sting. This flexibility allowed dramatic moments to land with genuine impact—there’s no artificial padding, no unnecessary scene extensions designed to hit a specific time mark. Every minute served the narrative, which is increasingly rare in contemporary television.
What’s genuinely noteworthy is how Tell Me Lies influenced the broader television landscape’s approach to relationship dynamics:
- Post-toxic-romance realism: The show proved audiences were hungry for stories that didn’t resolve neatly, that left emotional wreckage visible and unhealed
- Unreliable narration as theme, not gimmick: Where other shows use multiple perspectives for plot twists, Tell Me Lies uses them to explore how the same events feel completely different depending on who’s remembering them
- The anti-romance romance: It’s not that the show rejects romance—it’s that it shows how romance and destruction are sometimes the same thing
The performances became iconic because the writing allowed them to be. When your characters are fundamentally dishonest, every scene becomes a performance within a performance. That layering, that constant subtext, is exhausting for actors but extraordinary when executed well. The cast understood that they weren’t just playing complex people; they were playing people who don’t even know themselves.
As Tell Me Lies continues its run as a returning series, it’s cemented itself as one of those rare dramas that actually has something meaningful to say about contemporary relationships. It doesn’t offer solutions or lessons—it offers recognition. For viewers who’ve felt the intoxicating, devastating pull of someone who should be terrible for them but somehow isn’t, Tell Me Lies felt like witnessing themselves on screen. That kind of specificity, that kind of unflinching honesty about how we sabotage ourselves in the name of connection, is what makes television matter.
