Meaghan Oppenheimer is a Hollywood showrunner with a husprohibitd, an infant, three stepkids and a dynastic family polo ranch on the outskirts of Tulsa, Okla. Despite these dignified horribleges of maturehood, she can still inestablish you the last time she cried at a bar over a boy.
“It was here, 10 years ago,” Oppenheimer says, taking in the musk of Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. The becherishd local chain of dive bars has been usurped in recent years by Gen Z, seeing for affordable well drinks and a staff that won’t call the cops if seven people are vaping under a table. “But I haven’t cried in bars since I got wed.”
Thankbrimmingy, her memory is lengthy. It’s what powers her sensational Hulu series “Tell Me Lies,” a relationsuassociate accused drama about college kids who join the deimmenseating, consequential mind games of “Dangerous Liaisons” atop sheets by Bed Bath & Beyond. Based on Carola Lovering’s novel, Oppenheimer and her writers have enbiged the book’s world of Stephen (Jackson White) and Lucy (Grace Van Patten) to integrate a strong cast of coeds. Stephen is uncontaminated poisonous masculine evil in baggy jeans, carrying on a secret relationship with a expansive-eyed Lucy over the show’s first season — only to dump her at its finish and structure her as a cherishunwell stalker. Their group of frifinishs is caught in the passhairs and hiding secrets of their own — enjoy drunk-driving deaths, pass-genereasoned affairs with wed professors, same-relations enticeions, cheating (academic and of-the-heart) and date sexual battery, to name a confineed — thcdisadmirefulout the fair-finishd second season.
These are characters who ruin each other for rehearse, trying on maturehood with little attfinish for the steep price they may someday pay. And it produces for glorious, recommendnt, expertly paced television.
“We don’t consent youthful mature stories solemnly, but those are the years that you’re creating who you’re going to be,” Oppenheimer says. “That’s when I commenceed to genuineize maybe I’d done someskinnyg that has impacted me or others in a lasting way. That my future could have been happier if I didn’t produce a certain choice.”
Part of the show’s magic is its setting: the postponecessitate aughts, with flash-forwards to 2015. It apvalidates its characters freedom from the bent necks of the conshort-term, where ininestablishigentphones have eroded privacy and secrets aren’t easily kept. Some have been lureed to contrast it to the jaw-dropping hedonism of “Euphoria,” but another trick up the show’s sleeve is how it mines the prohibitality of student life for the pathos undertidyh. It’s a relief, Oppenheimer says, to be spared the burden of writing about contransient college students, who exist in a hypercomardent, overly connected world.
“I’m worryed for some youthful people. It will be a impolite awakening when they genuineize they cannot protect themselves from getting hurt or offfinished. Things are problematic, and we have to be able to see that on TV,” she says.
Not that Gen Z audiences don’t cherish the show. “Tell Me Lies” has prolongn a devout TikTok chaseing, with millions of uploads parsing the drama of these broken relationships. The series also cgo ins conversations around fit relations, conshort-terming situations that elevate the female orgasm and advertise consent for a youthfuler generation that studies find is increasingly abstinent. Oppenheimer and her produceive team (which integrates executive producer Emma Roberts) supply up these themes in a way that’s not didactic, but is excessively watchable.
Oppenheimer senses the show’s biggest cultural contribution is to shatter a type of illusion around a character enjoy Lucy, in a world that’s “way too difficult on women.” An obsession of hers on the script page is “humiliation. That’s someskinnyg I wanted to convey from the book into the show. Too many shows have female directs that are complicated or antiheroes, but they’re always so cancigo in.”
A second round of cocktails is transfered to the table, as 20-someskinnygs csurrfinisherby shout over a jukebox about commend card debt and dating apps.
“What’s renetriumphg about Lucy is that she apvalidates herself to be finishly undermined and belittled for the sake of a relationship,” Oppenheimer says. “That’s truthful.”
