Review of season 2 of Tell Me Lies: More of everything

The summer of toxic love continues: After a truly confusing press tour for It ends with usthe domestic violence drama, oddly marketed as a flowery Blake Lively-directed romance, Hulu's Tell me lies returns after a two-year break with his own warning stories about relationship toxicity, covered up with some gossip Girl 2.0 Glamour. (Appropriately, the handsome star of this reboot, Thomas Doherty, is signing up for the second season of the college drama.)

Season one of Tell me lies revolved around the neg-heavy, nauseating “love story” between bright-eyed college student Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and her borderline sociopathic boyfriend Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), casting their troubled relationship and frequent sex scenes in a light so warm it borders on glorification. (The fact that Van Patten and White are dating in real life doesn't help fans fall in love with their characters.) But the second season does a good job of showing that destructive fuckboy behavior can lurk in less obviously nefarious corners, too. “Why am I so attracted to these fucked-up guys?” Lucy laments to her best friend Pippa (Sonia Mena) during a mid-season stoner session. “There's nothing wrong with you,” Pippa commiserates before she The most important lesson of this season: “How are we supposed to know that someone is dangerous when we first meet them?”

Sure, the sheer amount of toxic masculinity (open and otherwise) What Lucy, Pippa, their best friend Bree (Catherine Missal) and the rest of the undergraduates at Baird College have to endure in just one semester can seem fantastic – at least if you've never set foot on a college campus with its wild student parties, tensions in dorms and office hours behind closed doors.

Tell me lies Season two throws viewers right back into that charged atmosphere, picking up shortly after the explosive events of the season one finale, as Lucy begins her sophomore year of college. Like the previous season, the narrative structure jumps between the character's high school years — in this case, September 2008, with all the first-generation iPhones and MGMT pinpricks that era requires — and seven years later, at the dramatic wedding of Bree and her college boyfriend Evan (Branden Cook). But it's the earlier period where the series really blossoms, effectively capturing the extreme intimacy and ever-changing group dynamics of college friends. (For example, Lucy and Pippa are regularly forced by their social circles to hang out with their respective exes — Stephen and Spencer House's Wrigley — which they more or less enjoy.)



Through this ensemble, the show expands both its focus and the consequences of these titular deceptions. With all the main story beats of Carola LoveringThe novel of the same name on which the series is based was covered in the first season, series creator Meaghan Oppenheimer & Co. have plenty of room to play with in Season 2, including the introduction of new characters like Doherty's Leo, a decidedly less heinous lover of Lucy's, and Oliver, a very hot Baird professor (played by Oppenheimer's very hot actor husband Tom Ellis) who catches Bree's eye. There's also room for unexpected connections and deeper links between recurring characters. The banter and bonding between Mena's Pippa and House's Wrigley is particularly compelling, with both characters movingly dealing with their share of trauma and guilt.

Ironically, the weak link is the show's juiciest selling point: the incessant and often grueling back and forth between Lucy and Stephen. Fortunately, in season two, Lucy is more often out for revenge than romance when it comes to her ex. This is a welcome change for those of us who spent season one screaming in Whoopi Goldberg voice at the TV every week, “Lucy, you’re in danger, girl!” But the bad guys never rest, so even if they don’t Strictly speaking Together they are always in a good mood and Stephen is never too far away, always with a light-hearted or sarcastic remark on the tip of his tongue. (“Why do you insist on being the most annoying person in every room, Stephen?” one character puts it succinctly.)

Despite White's playful villainy, Stephen's almost cartoonish manipulations pale in comparison to the already terrifying and unfortunately recognizable everyday exploitations the young women experience this season: waking up sleepy and naked in a bedroom you don't recognize, watching your own Prince Charming turn into a violent animal, and no one believing you when you cry wolf. When you're on a diet of Fifty shades and, yes, Colleen Hoover books, then all the lurid car crashes, hot affairs and years of betrayal will surely continue to be exciting. But Tell me lies remains best when it tells us truths.

Tell me lies Season 2 starts September 4 on Hulu