The Extratextuals

After a hectic week away from television, I finally found my way back home (I invoke Homer Simpson: “television: teacher, mother, secret lover!”), and have been catching up on DVR treats. Included in this mix was the premier to FOX’s new show with Tim Roth, Lie to Me.

The premise is gimmicky – a guy has super skills to tell when someone’s lying, and thus is called upon to solve crimes, cut through politicians’ crap, and so forth. Tim Roth is the guy. He’s aided by a woman who thinks he’s too cynical and needs to lighten up, and by the lying clinic equivalent of a CSI lab monkey whose quirk is “radical honesty,” meaning that he says whatever he’s thinking. The premier sees Roth trying to solve a murder of a teacher, in which a Jehovah’s Witness kid is the prime suspect, and trying to get to the bottom of a politician who is lying about his time with a call girl. What did I think?

First off, let’s pause to note how appropriate it is that the company behind Fox News would be interested in the science of lying.

Anyways, I wanted to like Lie to Me, since I like Roth. He’s a smart, interesting actor. But the show is neither smart nor that interesting. It’s okay, and I may stick with it, since premiers are often unrepresentative of the show’s eventual style. But I’m ready to drop it quickly.

The key problem arises due to this whole lying thing. In your standard procedural, people often lie to us, causing a second or third round of interrogation later on, with the truth coming out later. However, since Lie to Me is keen to show us how people lie, we get these odd moments when the camera zooms in on a ruffled nose, the sound dies so that we can hear only the person’s breath, a person’s head scratch is compared to a picture of Saddam Hussein doing the same thing, or so forth. In other words, we know when people are lying. In and of itself, that might be acceptable, and these moments clearly aim to be the “scientific” studies that CSI “down the esophagus”-style CGI also aim to be. But in order for us to see these characters’ lies happening, the actors are called upon to make silly facial expressions and to make it so patently obvious that they’re lying. If the point is that Roth has these special skills, it’s sad irony that anyone with a modicum of social skills will see the lie themselves. There’s nothing special about his skills, in other words.

Even the explanations that accompany each lie are a little belabored. Some are genuinely interesting and made me think. For instance, Roth’s character notes that genuine surprise, since it’s surprise, lasts less time than BS surprise; that a real smile nearly always has an eye wrinkle accompanying it; and that, contrary to public belief, a liar will usually look you directly in the eye, precisely because they want to see if you’re buying it. His partner also offers an interesting technique of asking a liar to tell his story backwards, as a way of making him trip over his tale. But others are silly and/or outright unbelievable. To reduce facial quirks to such a predictable science, too, is farfetched, and risks becoming the equivalent of a procedural in which guilt is determined by astrological sign: knowing that someone had an affair with someone else because they twitch their chin is about as stupid as thinking that I didn’t like this show because I’m a Leo.

I also wonder how long they can keep this up. After all, how many visual signs are there of lying? I foresee episode 5 offering us nuggets of wisdom such as, “I know he’s a fan of Victorian haberdashery because when I asked him if he was, I saw a bead of sweat on his left ear lobe, the universal sign of closeted Victorian haberdashery fandom!” or “can’t you tell she’s lying? She pronounced her O’s like a New Englander!” Either that, or we’re going to be forced to recycle all the same signs.

Unfortunately, too, the script is pretty poor. Between us, my wife and I guessed every plot twist long before it happened. Maybe the show aims to reassure people that they are all “naturals,” the one in ten million (or whatever the bogus stat the show offers is) who have no training yet can tell a lie, but each and every lie yelled itself from the mountaintops. This is in part because it’s so trite (yes, the show even ends with a dude in a suit telling a woman that he loves her and is going to leave his wife, but he needs more time). And thus I often didn’t need the “science” of deception analysis to get what was going on; I just needed to have watched a detective film or tv show sometime in my life. All the fun is taken out of the lies, therefore, since you know they’re coming before they’re there.

Roth is interesting, and I want to like it more because I’m happy to see him on air. But ultimately, a show whose premise relies on reducing the fineries of social contact to a pure science, in an ironically befitting way, reduces the fineries of good writing to a paint-by-numbers show (she’s having an affair with the principal: gasp! The Jehovah’s Witness had unclean thoughts about his attractive blond teacher: wow! The politician’s call girl is actually his daughter: no way! He didn’t really kill himself and it was just a ruse? Unbelievable!). For the show to improve, it will need to tell much better lies and sell them.

new shows Lie to Me, Tim Roth