Amazon’s Silly E. Lockhart YA Adaptation

In the very last of its eight hours, Amazon’s We Are Liars finally gets really, truly, fire-up-the-group-chat interesting. How specifically it gets interesting I can’t say, since it constitutes the biggest, most spoiler-y reveal of the entire series. Suffice it to say the whole affair — not just the twist but the way it’s handled in the aftermath — is the sort of big swing that had me bug-eyed and howling.

Whether it actually lands is another question, and I’m not convinced it does, leaning heavily on relationships too thinly sketched to drum up the requisite emotion, and on character choices so rash they strain credulity. But it is by far the most daring choice in a series that otherwise feels like a lukewarm casserole slapped together from overused ingredients: part YA romance, part not-quite-murder mystery and part self-hating wealth porn, smothered in enough overwrought fairy tale metaphors to stock the children’s section of your local library.

It is the mystery aspect that surfaces first in Julie Plec and Carina Adly Mackenzie’s adaptation of E. Lockhart’s hit novel. Literally: In the opening scene, 16-year-old Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind) washes ashore alone in the middle of the night, with no recollection of how she got there. A year later, still recovering from her traumatic brain injury, she returns to Beechwood, the private New England island that her blond-haired, blue-eyed Sinclair clan retreats to each summer. Maybe there, she’ll find some clues to trigger her missing memories.

In practice, this mostly means she goes around demanding answers from relatives who refuse to supply them, for what turn out to be sensible reasons bafflingly withheld until late in the season. Her determination nevertheless pays off, and in conveniently linear fashion. The rest of We Were Liars chronologically unspools the events of Cadence’s 16th summer, when Beechwood was still an enchanted haven away from the real world and Cadence herself was still — as she puts it in one of her many, many voiceovers, with her signature high-school-lit-mag flair — “strength and promise and spun gold.”

What she recalls seems at first like a wistful teen romance in the mode of The Summer I Turned Pretty; indeed, from the perspective of Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), the lovelorn childhood friend Cadence finally starts to see as “a guy guy,” it might as well be called The Summer I Turned Handsome. But Lind and Maheshwari lack the chemistry to sell the love story, despite premiere director Nzingha Stewart’s efforts to engineer some through intimate close-ups of searching eyes, bitten lips and fluttering fingertips — much less to propel it through seemingly endless rounds of hot-and-cold dithering.

In any case, their romantic idyll gives way to a larger disillusionment as the weeks wear on, and this is where We Were Liars’ third big throughline creeps in. Fixated as she is on Gat, Cadence starts to see what he sees in the Sinclairs — the racism and snobbery underneath all their beautiful mansions, lavish parties and gleaming jewels. So, in time, do her cousins, artsy Mirren and mischievous Johnny, who, despite getting less screen time than Cadence, feel more fully realized thanks to strong performances by Esther McGregor and Joseph Zada.

If Beechwood is a kingdom, as Cadence so frequently describes it, it’s one ruled with an iron fist by her media magnate grandfather, Harris (David Morse). It’s his money that keeps the Sinclair lifestyle running and props up his three daughters: Cadence’s recently divorced mother, Penny (a quite good Caitlin FitzGerald); Johnny’s recovering addict mom, Carrie (Mamie Gummer); and Mirren’s mother, Bess (Candice King), an exacting housewife. And it’s his whims that therefore dictate the way the Sinclairs behave toward him, toward each other, toward their children — even toward their romantic partners in the case of Ed (a warm and wise Rahul Kohli), Carrie’s boyfriend and Gat’s uncle, whose skin color and comparably modest class status Harris barely even pretends not to disdain.

We Were Liars is a decent take on the ways money can start to seem like a replacement for love when there’s so much of the former and so little of the latter to go around, how it can warp or trap the very people it ostensibly protects. Problem is, it’s also one we’ve seen dozens of times already, often with brighter insight or sharper bite, on everything from Succession to The White Lotus to Sirens to any number of prestige dramas in which Nicole Kidman plays a wife with devastating secrets but an enviable designer wardrobe. In such a vast sea of stories about miserable rich white people, it’s hard to feel moved by the glacially paced awakening of one pampered princess coming to realize, at the big age of 16, that there might be more to life than partying on her family’s private beach.

Which brings us back to that twist. We Were Liars’ various themes ultimately braid together in a climax so explosive that it stretches the suspension of disbelief to the point of breaking. Then the show shatters it altogether with a final reveal that’s meant to put a bittersweet button on the whole thing, to make you weep for what this poor girl has been through but maybe also cheer for the promise of a brighter future ahead. Instead, I found myself baffled by the pointlessness of this particular fantasy, which raises all these big ideas just to chuck them in the water.

“I’m so sick of fucking fairy tales,” Cadence grumbles midway through the season, frustrated by the muddiness of her own tale. I could not have agreed more.