Lies, Lies, Lies!

Lie to Me was a TV series starring established, award-winning actors, Tim Roth and Kelli Williams. The show's exceptional "character chemistry" was supplemented by some up-and-coming, talented young actors, Monica Raymund, Brendan Hines and Hayley McFarland.

The series was based on a new area of science, established by Dr. Paul Ekman, the leading expert on detecting lies, deception and emotions through what are called facial "microexpressions." Episodes had a wide variety of mysteries that included humor and engaging human drama. The series had a fresh premise, was well written, had high production values, was well funded, and had outstanding editing.

The first shows were successful, but then the audience quickly dropped off.

What happened?

Some say the series made people uncomfortable by educating them on how lies and deceit could be detected. You would think people would want to know when they were being lied to. I guess that depends. Let me digress for a moment to illustrate an aspect of this.

Some years back I got an internship at a foundation that was doing experiments in television. One involved a federally-funded project analyzing speeches (primarily by politicians) for verbal and non-verbal indicators of deceit (AKA, lies).

When word got out about the project, government funding was abruptly withdrawn.

At that point we had a Republican Administration which we later discovered mislead the public to keep a costly war going.

Two unfortunate truisms come to mind:

Truth is the first casualty of war, and
What people want to believe is more important than what's true.

Some people point to other possible "failure factors" in Lie to Me.

The dialogue moved rapidly and people who were multitasking while watching TV (which most now do) probably didn't catch much of what was going on. Roth's British accent and idioms probably didn't help. It is only by watching the DVDs and possibly reviewing sections that you can catch (and appreciate) everything.

Admittedly, like all television drama, there were the inevitable gaps in the story line caused by condensing complex stories into the limited time allotted. And, let's not forget that the series pointed out facts about human behavior that many people find uncomfortable.

Finally, since this show was based on research and science, it may have in part fallen victim to "the cerebral factor." (Have you noticed that many rather simplistic series have continued on TV for many years while more sophisticated and cerebral shows get canceled?)

With these things in mind, I'll let you write your own moral to this story.

-Ron Whittaker

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