Hulu’s soapy, dark relationship drama “Tell Me Lies,” shot in metro Atlanta, has been given a third season.
The green light came two months after season two came out.
The series, loosely based on Carol Lovering’s 2018 bestselling novel of the same name, starts in a college setting and focuses on the passionate yet toxic dynamics between Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White). It is set in dual timelines of 2008 and 2015.
“Although their relationship begins like any typical campus romance,” Hulu said in the show’s initial synopsis, “they quickly fall into an addictive entanglement that will permanently alter not only their lives but the lives of everyone around them.”
Gen Zers on Reddit and TikTok began picking apart the show’s plotlines, giving it plenty of buzz. Among 12,000 user reviews on IMDb.com, the show rates a 7 out of 10. Hulu, like most streamers, doesn’t release viewership numbers for shows but “Tell Me Lies” spent several weeks on Hulu’s top 15 most popular shows this past fall after season two came out.
The show’s fictional Baird College uses Agnes Scott College in Decatur for exteriors. Some interiors were shot at a building in Decatur that was also used by several former CW shows including “Black Lightning,” “The Originals” and “The Vampire Diaries.”
The second season expanded to include more storylines from their friend group featuring topics like date rape, same-sex attraction and cross-generational affairs with married professors and ended with a tragedy and a cliff-hanger.
“One of the main reasons that I wanted to do the show in the first place is to debunk this myth that only weak or stupid women get tricked by narcissists and bad people,” show creator Meaghan Oppenheimer told Variety. “That only silly women get run over by love. It happens to the strongest of us. Some of the most incredible women I know, their one weak spot is a man or relationships. There’s something so vulnerable about that. I don’t know what it is about wanting to be loved that makes us forget ourselves.”
Oppenheimer added that the dual storylines will continue, but “by the third season, we will still have some 2008 because there’s stuff that we have to wrap up there. But I think it would be a little bit shifted in the sense that there will probably be more 2015 than 2008. We’ll get more and more of the future as time goes on.”
