We Were Liars Review: An Angsty Teen Thriller That’s Not as Fun as It Wants to Be

Television these days is full of stories about rich people’s problems. From The White Lotus and Sirens to The Perfect Couple and Big Little Lies, we love stories that let us revel in the excess of the super wealthy, whether that’s their designer outfits or the bad behavior they seem to be uniquely positioned to get away with. 

Prime Video’s We Were Liars is essentially the YA version of this trend. Based on a popular young adult novel, the story follows a quartet of rich (or at least rich-adjacent) kids who discover the pains of power and privilege, even as they must solve an uncomfortable mystery involving one of their own.

Nothing about the series is particularly groundbreaking (save for the bonkers twist that arrives to blow up everything in its final episode), and its story has little to say that those previously mentioned series about the uberwealthy haven’t tackled before (and better). 

The story follows the Sinclair family, so wealthy and well-connected that they’re often referred to as American royalty.

Teen cousins Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind), Johnny (Joseph Zada), Mirren (Esther McGregor) and their friend Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) spend idyllic summers on the family’s private island, dubbing themselves “the Liars” for nonsensical reasons and living in posh houses with names like Windemere, Red Gate, and Cuddledown (yes, really). 

Tasked with doing little more than tanning, partying, playing Scrabble, and deploying endless fairytale metaphors to describe how perfect their lives are, the Liars have spent every summer together since they were eight years old.

But things take a dark turn during Summer 16 (the pretentious way the group marks the passage of time means this is the year they’re all 16, not 2016 like you might initially assume), when eldest Sinclair granddaughter Cady washes alone onshore in the middle of the night, with no memory of what happened, a traumatic brain injury, and a family unwilling to tell her the truth.

Her search for answers about what happened to her is the series’ primary narrative driver, as an amnesiac Cadence returns to Beechwood in Summer 17, determined to somehow reclaim her memories and find the answers she’s been denied.

How did she end up in the water? Was she attacked? Why haven’t any of the Liars reached out in the year that has passed? What is her mother keeping from her?

Told using a dual timeline format, the present-day scenes mostly involve Cady trying to trigger memories and experiencing debilitating headaches, while the main action unfolds in the past through a series of flashbacks that all conveniently take place in chronological order. (With many, many overwrought voiceovers attempting to tie the series’ timelines and themes together.)

In all honesty, this narrative split doesn’t really work. While it’s easy to tell the two timelines apart, given that Cadence has blond hair in the Summer 16 flashbacks and brunette hair in the present day, there’s little rhyme or reason to how or why she’s remembering the things she remembers, and the story’s forward momentum is uneven at the best of times. 

Her search for answers feels exhaustingly repetitive as she stomps from relative to relative, insisting they simply tell her the things that they are (quite sensibly, as it turns out later) withholding from her. The show is also not particularly subtle about the fact that every character around Cady is hiding some major secret, but its overlong runtime means it has problems building or sustaining any sort of real narrative tension.

The bulk of the series is set in the Summer 16 timeline, which initially unfolds as a standard teen romance/coming of age story.

The Liars are coming into their own on Beechwood. Cady and Gat, who’ve been friends all their lives, tentatively begin to explore the idea that there might be something more between them, as cousins Johnny and Mirren deal with secrets of their own.  

To its credit, We Were Liars’ depiction of its central friendship is warm and believable, and the chemistry between its four teen leads speaks of relationships born of years of familiarity and care, as they attend Fourth of July parties and take part in weird rich people rituals like the family’s annual lemon hunt (dressed in yellow, naturally). 

The show is clunkier when it tries to be something other than a breezy teen drama, however. 

Cady’s relationship with Gat — who is the son of Johnny’s mother’s boyfriend’s brother, say that five times fast — is, on the surface, sweet and insubstantial, but his presence helps open her eyes to larger issues of injustice in the world and the ways her family’s massive wealth inures her from so much of what the rest of humanity must face.

Unsurprisingly, We Were Liars is not the sort of series that’s equipped to handle a real conversation about any of these systemic societal issues of wealth, privilege, or what people of means owe to those with less. (“Ever since you came back from India, you’ve been obsessed with the evils of colonization!” is literally a line that comes out of someone’s mouth.) 

Maheshwari genuinely tries his best, but this subplot treats Gat as a token afterthought, the class-conscious character of color who’s present to lecture his rich white friends about their privilege, the dangers of poverty, and the inherent rudeness of not knowing the names of the servants who bring you dinner. 

Candice King, Caitlin FitzGerald, Mamie Gummer, Joseph Zada, Esther McGregor, Shubham Maheshwari

The show is at its best as a toxic family drama, introducing three generations of tortured, problematic Beechwood Island regulars, including racist patriarch Harris Sinclair (David Morse), and his three daughters Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald), and Bess (Caroline King), and a passel of younger siblings known as “the Littles”. 

Everyone except for the youngest kids is deeply unlikeable, and the relationships between and among the adults are as fraught and messy as any between their teenage children. Yet, there’s something weirdly addictive about watching the Sinclair sisters literally fight one another for their father’s attention and repeatedly sacrifice their own happiness on the altar of his approval.

Is it completely ridiculous that grown women should behave this way towards each other? Absolutely. Are their claws-out face-offs some of the series’ best scenes? Sure are. 

Their dysfunction manifests in predictable and largely uninteresting ways as they have affairs and throw each other under the bus in the hopes of being dubbed their father’s favorite.

But it’s all so ridiculously soapy — and Gummer, FitzGerald, and King throw themselves into their roles with such bitchy gusto — that it’s more entertaining than it has any right to be. 

The series’ final episode hints at the ways We Were Liars might have been something more than a pale imitation of better series that have come before it.

In it, the sort of bombshell revelation happens that rewrites everything you thought you understood about the show you were watching, and hints at more complex, darker themes. It’s so shocking, it’s difficult to even say whether it’s good, narratively speaking, but it’s exactly the sort of daring storytelling the rest of this series lacks. 

It’s a twist that doesn’t really make sense, requires an Olympic-level suspension of disbelief, and raises some rather thorny issues about some fairly significant life questions that it doesn’t bother to even try to answer, but it’s memorable in a way that so much of the rest of this show is not. 

Of course, things end on a jarringly weird cliffhanger that both hints at a potential second season and a possible prequel, which undoes some of the bittersweet triumph found in the finale’s closing moments. 

We Were Liars is too long, ponderously paced, and burdened by a variety of smaller subplots that either don’t add much to the original or actively detract from it. (For example, in E. Lockhart’s novel, Harris Sinclair is not such a cartoonish villain, and it makes a surprising amount of difference.)

But while its surprisingly moving, emotionally jarring finale is worth sticking around for, it’s hard not to wonder what a series that wasn’t quite so much work to get there might have been like. 

We Were Liars premieres June 18 on Prime Video.

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