Nous les menteurs

I'm usually really picky with TV shows. I can tell within a few minutes if something isn't for me. But this show grabbed me almost immediately. Maybe it was the visuals, or the divergent storyline, but something about it just clicked. The dynamic between the three Sinclair sisters was the highlight for me, their squabbles, their raw honesty, and the beautiful chaos of their lives. It felt authentic. Familiar, even reminiscent of Succession, but still fresh in its own way.

I expected the flashbacks to throw me off, and at first, I thought I was more drawn to their pasts, the lives they lived before the accident we knew little about. But as the episodes unfolded, I found myself just as invested in what had happened as I was in what was coming next. It surprised me how much I cared. It made perfect sense.

The four major roles - Cady, Gat, Mirrin and Johnny are cast with actors that are too old to play 16-year-old teenagers. Shubham Maheshwari, who plays Gat, is 29. The actresses who play Cady and Mirrin are 23 and the actor who plays Johnny is 20. The carriage and maturity between a 16-year- old and a 23-year-old is very different. It shows.

The mothers are only 10 years older than their actor children. Again, it shows.

The other thing that is unrealistic is how money grubbing the three sister's characters are. If they hate each other so much, they wouldn't spend the summer's together. And not every person with money just wants money. The patriarch is also a horrible person, also all about money. I think the author or screenwriters are writing about a world they don't know or understand. Very shallow writing.

The scenery is pretty, the premise bizarre. Issues that could have been explored were ignored. Other issues - like grief, privilege and race were dealt with badly.

This show is not convincing on so many levels, so I say - it is a miss.

I grew up as one of the "poorer" cousins to old money from the east, so I am very familiar with the mindset, settings, attitudes, and behaviors of the wealthy. So far this does, in fact, portray them accurately. Yes they pretend to be perfect, but are far from it in reality. Maybe they're not portrayed favorably, as some critics would hope for, but accurately. I'm not here for that though, what I am here for is the mystery of regaining memories, rediscovering family, and character growth/development. Even though some people seem to be too idealistic in their views of the world, that's how some people are. I didn't get the sense that this show is being preachy at all. One character's views are not propped up as the only correct view. People believe different things, share different insights, get upset over petty issues, and it all comes together in a kaleidoscope of personalities. And "news flash" most people are disgusting, fallible, and stupid, whether they are in a trailer park, or in a mansion. It's just that some mask it better than others, and some try to control things so much to overcompensate for it, that the control bleeds over into invading the lives of others. I think if anything, so far, the show tells us that lies have consequences, no matter who you are. That is universal.

This 8-part miniseries hit Prime streaming yesterday. My wife and I settled in and watched the first two episodes.

The biggest issue is nothing much happens in the first two episodes. The main character has an incident she doesn't remember at the end of episode one. Then most of episode two is flashing back and forward to understand why her family and friends reacted the way they did. And juveniles trying to sort out boy-girl issues. Sort of a teenage soap opera.

One reviewer wrote "flat, nonengaging", another wrote "lazy writing, lazy cast saying lazy lines." That pretty well captures this limited series. A story that might have been told well in a 90-minute movie is stretched to roughly 8 hours and the filmmakers expect us to devote all that time with just the HOPE that it will turn out entertaining and worthwhile.

Well, not for us. After giving it almost 24 hours to set in my wife and I both decided we had no interest in sticking with it.

However a week later I did watch the last episode just to see how they tried to tie things up. In fact I found it to be very interesting and I was surprised at what all had happened. I will go so far as to state, if a viewer doesn't want to spend 8 hours on the whole series then watching episodes 1, 2, and 8 can be pretty entertaining.

But one can tell, from the episode synopses provided by Prime for each episode, most of the filler time involves teenage soap-opera types of topics. That wasn't of much interest to us grandparents.

When I started watching this show, I had literally no expectations since the little I had heard about the book wasn't that good. But it was an excellent surprise! The mystery of what happened to the protagonist, her pain and confusion trying to remember the year before and her sweet romance was incredibly hooking. It took me basically one sitting to watch it all. Emily Alyn Lynd does an excellent job as a trauma survivor and is able to made me sympathize with her pain despite of my reality being as far as possible from a white rich girl. I liked most of the other actors, too, and my only reason to not giving 10 stars is the unnecessary length of the show giving the fact that there were not so much plot beside of what happened to the protagonist. But, in sum, I was completely hooked from the start and entirely devastated at the ending of it.