It’s probably not a great sign when your soapy, beach-read-turned-summer-watch mystery series ends its first episode and it’s still not entirely clear what the mystery is.
Maybe that’s not fair to We Were Liars, an eight-episode Prime Video adaptation of the YA novel by E. Lockhart that premieres June 18. The show is upfront about the fact that its heroine Cadence Eastman (Emily Alyn Lind) will wash up on the shore of the island where she summers with her wealthy, powerful family, with no memory of what happened to her, before gradually revealing the events leading up to her injury.
It’s a fine hook for this sort of thing, and the first episode loads up on the necessary backstory, explaining how Cadence, her cousins Johnny (Joseph Zada) and Mirren (Esther McGregor), and not-quite-cousin Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) became thick as thieves—or, rather, “liars,” as they collectively refer to themselves—during their summers together. Cadence also refers to those summers by her age at the start of each one; the show begins at the onset of “Summer Sixteen,” when romantic feelings are beginning to stir between Cadence and Gat.
A kiss between the two teenagers is the last thing Cadence remembers when she wakes up from a coma months later, which means that when she returns to the island for Summer Seventeen (with the obligatory timeline-differentiating, mood-indicating brunette dye job), she’s also trying to recover almost a summer’s worth of lost time from the previous year. The show proceeds on parallel tracks, continuing past the pivotal kiss in Summer Sixteen while also following the characters as they reunite for Summer Seventeen.
So are those subsequent Summer Sixteen scenes Cadence’s memories slowly returning in conveniently chronological order, flashbacks explained by other characters who do remember, or simply a storyline where only the audience is privy to the full picture? Somehow, the answer to all those questions is yes, depending on the episode or scene.
By the third episode, Cadence’s memory has conveniently caught up to where the audience is in the Summer Sixteen timeline. Then, her cousins start to fill her in on a few further developments from that summer, with the caveat that they’re not supposed to say too much lest they cause her further distress.
Though Cadence is perturbed by this memory blockade (which also extends to her mother and aunts), for stretches of the show she seems remarkably understanding about the fact that the people she’s closest to in the world are casually withholding information about her life-threatening, life-changing head injury. With later episodes seemingly converting to showing the audience what Cadence doesn’t remember (while withholding certain other bits of information), it all feels like the world’s most slapdash gaslighting.
Obviously there are certain conceits that need to be accepted to go along with the intrigue of a mystery show, especially one more focused on family dynamics than formal detective work. But with We Were Liars, those conceits are profoundly inelegant and structurally confusing, forcing the show to do something simple (show parallel storylines set a year apart) in the most convoluted way possible.
There is ultimately a reason for the narrative gymnastic routine, just as there’s a reason for the subplots that often isolate the three feuding sisters—the respective mothers of Cadence, Jonathan, and Mirren—from the teenage storyline. But a whole season is a long way to go for the eventual solution, especially when the grown-up material feels so much like filler somehow convinced that it’s the stuff of rich American-aristocracy tragedy and gothic-tinged class tensions.
In reality, it’s one of those rich-people stories full of writerly clunkiness, like having all of the characters constantly refer to their supposedly storied family name (even the Kennedys may not talk about their own legacy as often as the Sinclairs say “Sinclair”) or having nonwhite characters state themes aloud. (“You’re code-switching… because you don’t belong with these people,” Gat’s mother says to her son, who barely has enough personality for one set of social cues, let alone two.)
It’s easy to imagine how much more smoothly all of this material (past, present; teenage, adult) must have been integrated on the page. On screen, the expansion to nearly eight hours mostly introduces contrivances and dramatic stalling, including a bunch of woo-woo narration and dialogue about fairy tales and storytelling.
Theoretically, the positive tradeoff would be watching actors add extra nuance to their literary counterparts. Lind, part of a three-sibling dynasty of genre mainstays (her older sister was on Gotham and The Gifted; her younger was on Chucky), has a wide-eyed hauntedness that holds the screen, and there’s a little spark from Esther McGregor (daughter of Ewan) as an aspiring artist starting to actually do some of the stuff she’s only texted about.
But the soundtrack cuts often have more life than the performances. As a limited series instead of a novel or more concise feature film, We Were Liars winds up too closely resembling a long day at a hot beach: Sort of enjoyable for a little while; eventually kind of a burn.
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