“This is like some ‘Knives Out’ meets ‘Get Out’ shit.”
If only this line — uttered six episodes into the eight-episode first season of Prime Video’s new rich-people-behaving-badly mystery “We Were Liars” — had been uttered sooner. Maybe if the four teen protagonists realized what sort of world they were living in, they wouldn’t have lingered there for so long. Maybe then, the horrifying events of Summer 16 wouldn’t have come to pass.
Then again, no one likes learning that their perfect fairytale is actually a nightmare. And for the Sinclair family, no price is too high when it comes to perfection — an ethos that gets pushed to its limits over the course of the Amazon series.
Adapted from the 2014 young adult novel by E. Lockhart (who serves as an executive producer on the show), “We Were Liars” follows the staggeringly wealthy Sinclair family over the course of two lavish summers on Beechwood, their own private island near Martha’s Vineyard. The Sinclairs consist of patriarch Harris (David Morse), his wife Tipper (Wendy Crewson), their three adult daughters, Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald) and Bess (Candice King), and the daughters’ children. Each sister’s eldest child was born around the same time: Carrie’s son Johnny (Joseph Zada), Penny’s daughter Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind) and Bess’ daughter Mirren (Esther McGregor) are all the same age, and with the addition of Johnny’s friend Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) — the nephew of Carrie’s longtime partner Ed (Rahul Kohli) — this quartet has grown up spending summers together and getting into mischief all over the island, earning them the bizarrely vicious moniker “the Liars.”
Except something happened during Summer 16 — the Liars number their summers by the age they all were at the time — that left Cadence injured and half-drowned on the beach, dressed only in her underwear and without any memory of what happened to her. When she returns for Summer 17, she’s determined to figure it out.
The problem is, no one will tell her. According to her mother, the truth was too traumatic, causing Cadence to black out and immediately forget what she’d learned. Eventually, the doctors told her that Cadence needed to recover the memories on her own. So the Sinclairs, including the Liars, all agree not to tell her anything about Summer 16 that she hasn’t already recalled for herself.
As to what traumatic memories Cadence is repressing, there’s no shortage of possibilities. Pretty much every adult Sinclair is some degree of awful, with the three daughters constantly at each other’s throats as they vie for their father’s affection — and, by extension, his vast wealth and real estate portfolio — and Harris dangling mansions in front of his progeny like a dog trainer with strips of bacon. Rather than attempt to shield the children from their entitled bickering, the sisters thrust them into it, dressing them up and coaching them on what to say in order to prove that they are the best, most worthy Sinclairs of them all.
It’s only when Cadence’s teenage hormones kick in during Summer 16, escalating her feelings toward Gat from childhood friendship to full-blown romantic obsession, that she realizes something might be off about the opulent Sinclair lifestyle. While the Liars have been spending summers together for years, she’s never noticed how uncomfortable Gat — whose family is from India — is during the extravagant Sinclair family traditions, nor how pointedly he has been kept from fully participating. Now, with her newfound perspective, it’s all she can see.
It turns out the gorgeous blond family with the private island is not only superficial and entitled, but also a little bit racist. Or, in some cases, a lot racist. Shocking.
Cadence begins to rebel against her picture-perfect family, taking the rest of the Liars with her. And really, they’re more than ready to rattle the bars of their gilded cages. Johnny and Mirren are also tired of the Sinclair drama, and Gat is both head-over-heels for Cadence and excited about finally feeling seen.
Cue a conflict-packed summer of lies, scandals and betrayals, which Cadence slowly recalls as the season unfolds. Until she hits a wall in her memory, which she assumes must somehow be worse than all of that. After all, if none of the other horrible things her family did that summer were enough to erase Cadence’s memory, how bad must things have gotten for her brain to decide that enough was enough? When she returns for Summer 17, Cadence begins to gather clues, hoping they’ll fill in her mental gaps. She’s most perplexed by the air of secrecy surrounding her fellow Liars when it comes to Summer 16. Despite their title, she never thought they lied to each other. Until now.
While “We Were Liars” stays true to most of the main beats of the novel, the show also adds in a slew of soapy subplots that often feel more in line with previous supernatural YA dramas from showrunners Julie Plec (“The Vampire Diaries”) and Carina Adly MacKenzie (“Roswell, New Mexico”) than to Lockhart’s original novel. While the book focuses almost entirely on Cadence, the show gives each of the Liars their own storyline, as well as most of the adult Sinclairs. For the Liars, these additions work: Johnny is in trouble at school; Mirren has a summer romance; Gat is trying to figure out his cultural identity after his trip to India.
The expansion of the adult storylines, nearly all of which reflect poorly on the Sinclairs, feel less successful. Harris stands out as the worst of the lot, charging determinedly over the book’s line of moral ambiguity to plant his feet firmly in villain territory, but his daughters fare little better. The overall impression is of a materialistic and stuck-up family in desperate need of humbling, begging the question of whether the show has made them too unlikeable to keep viewers invested after receiving answers to the season’s big mystery. Unlike the book’s conclusive ending, the series ends on a surprising and tonally perplexing cliffhanger, setting up a potential second season.
As a self-contained mystery, “We Were Liars” mostly works, sprinkling in clues throughout each episode that pay off well by the end (book readers especially will enjoy the subtle ways the show teases the truth throughout). Each of the Liars is well cast in their role (sadly, the same cannot be said of some of their wigs), and their earnest performances make it easy to root for these four teenagers, who somehow come out feeling like underdogs despite their massive privilege. And while the adult characters aren’t done any favors by a script that appears not to like any of them (except Ed), the cast does an excellent job embodying the abhorrent Sinclair family, which in turn helps the audience understand exactly what the Liars are rebelling against.
Overall, “We Were Liars” is a solid entry into the hazy summer melodrama canon, sitting comfortably beside other twisty, sun-soaked series like “Big Little Lies” and “Cruel Summer.” While it does get a little bogged down under its many subplots — and the cliffhanger ending feels almost like it was tacked on from one of the showrunners’ previous shows — it’s still a fun series, quick to binge and easy to digest, culminating in a sweeping bittersweet finale that will leave viewers emotionally satisfied, and maybe even in tears.
But don’t worry. If you don’t want anyone to know you were crying, you can always lie.
“We Were Liars” premieres Wednesday, June 18, on Prime Video.
