Lie to Me
One of the following statements is false.
A) When I can, I spend my weekends hiking.
B) I'm scared of large fish.
C) I've seen every Matlock episode made.
OK, so what do you think? Can't figure it out? Well, don't blame yourself. Unless you're my mother (Hi, Mom!), you probably don't know that much about me. And it's hard to pick up dishonesty in the written word. For all you know, I hit the keys a little harder when I lie or write a little slower. But the words look the same.
Now, if I gave you the same spiel while we shared coffee, you'd figure out my lie before I took my second sip. I'm a terrible liar.
Of course, in the ethos of Fox's new hit drama Lie to Me, we're all terrible liars. We reveal our falsehoods with every shimmy of our eyebrows, every twitch of our mouths. These little tics, called micro-expressions, are involuntary—dead giveaways to someone like Dr. Cal Lightman.
Pants on Fire Consulting
Tim Roth's Lightman is television's latest brilliant-yet-socially-inept mystery solver, à la Adrian Monk, Dr. House and a half-dozen other characters. Lightman may be abrasive and acerbic, but he's never, ever wrong. He heads a freelance consulting firm called The Lightman Group—an organization staffed top to bottom with lie-detecting savants. Among them, Dr. Gillian Foster helps smooth out some of Lightman's rough edges, while Ria Torres and Eli Loker serve as youngish understudies. Each episode launches this fib-hunting foursome into our land of lies, solving two mysteries per installment. Clearly, judging by Lightman's posh offices, they don't get paid by the hour.
Cases are often ripped right from today's headlines. Lightman, for instance, tracks down a missing 11-year-old, while Torres and Loker question an author whose autobiography may or may not be completely made up. One episode features a Bernie Madoff-like tycoon. And, though threads of office intrigue do weave through the season (Foster's husband may be cheating on her; Lightman's trying to move past a divorce), most storylines are relatively self-contained, making it seem a bit like a TV network security blanket: You know what you're going to get when you watch it.
Which is not to say that Lie to Me is either simple or simplistic. Indeed, the program is sometimes thought-provoking and often aspires to complexity. The good guys don't always do good things, and the bad guys aren't altogether bad. The autobiographer, for instance, fabricated her story to draw attention to an all-too-real injustice. The Madoff character actually confessed to a crime he didn't commit to save his daughter some prison time.
"The worst lies we tell are out of love," Foster tells him.
The Truth ... Relatively Speaking
These messy morality tales, at their best, force viewers to re-evaluate their sense of fair play. And in doing so, offer this moral message: Lying (even done with good intentions) will lead to trouble. If the Bible says "Thou shalt not lie" (and it does), this show adds, "And if thou dost, The Lightman Group shall catch thee." Lightman hates deception, and he pounces on fibbers quicker than you can say "The dog ate my homework" or "I don't know what happened to that last piece of cake, honey."
But here's where the show starts rubbing a bit: To get at the truth, Lightman often lies like the dickens.
To encourage a murder suspect to confess, Lightman gets someone to masquerade as the victim's father, creating a highly charged (and revealing) interrogation setting. When an immigration official is less than forthcoming, Lightman threatens to falsely accuse him of having an affair. He gives journalists bogus tips, surreptitiously plants a microphone on a friend of his and gets the city to crack down on a strip club under the deceitful accusation that there's been a syphilis outbreak there.
And we haven't even gotten to the lies Lightman and his fellow truth-detectors tell each other. (You'd think they'd be able to catch all those.)
Lied and Seek
The program has other problems. Though Lie to Me is, in many ways, more palatable than some of its primetime brethren—it featured very little overt violence in the episodes I watched, and profanity was sequestered to the occasional "jacka--" and "d--n"—that doesn't mean it's devoted to decorum. Viewers have watched bikini-clad dancers writhing around strippers' poles and witnessed a suicidal woman jump off a bridge. Subject matter can be pretty intense: The child abduction story ends happily enough, but any plot revolving around the kidnapping of a tween girl is bound to wander into some frank, uncomfortable areas.
I won't lie to you, though. Lie to Me's main issue is its convoluted relativism, with Lightman sending liars to the clink even as he lies to send them there. So is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" all it's cracked up to be or not?
Oh, and regarding my quiz ... I don't care for light gray suits.
Episodes Reviewed: March 11, 18, April 1, 2009