Tell Me Lies (2022–2024): A Brief Review

Tell Me Lies (2022–2024) is a show on Hulu set in college. Yes, it’s set in college, not in high school, which is different from most other teen/young adult dramas I’ve seen. And it’s at Baird College, basically a perfect stand-in for Bard College in upstate NY, which my doppelgänger Kacper Jarecki attended for a year before he was bullied out. It’s supposed to be for “different” people but it’s essentially a bubble for rich white kids — and true to its source material (well, the novel it is based on is set in Georgia, and the main character from California, but no matter), the main characters are whites from Long Island, one privileged, one not so much. The richest characters, though, are People of Color, and there’s no focus in the show at all on race. The only racial incident occurs when the filthy rich black guy (his father invented something trivial that hit it big) has all his friends over at his enormous country/summer estate — as he’s checking the mail, a white neighbor approaches him and asks if he lives there — she’s never seen him around. He replies that his family owns the estate and maybe she should ask the guy she’s renting the place from. He smirks and walks away. The second POC is a perfectionist who has a rich lawyer daddy, and the third is a Latina who had troubled fitting in at her former private school. Only the white people have real problems.