Stream It Or Skip It: ‘We Were Liars’ On Prime Video, Where A Teenager Tries To Get Answers After An Accident Leaves Her With Amnesia

Are we sick of shows about rich people being terrible yet? How about teens that get into scary situations and have to unearth secrets? Well, if you’re not, you’re in luck! A new Prime Video drama basically combines both of streaming TV’s favorite 2020s series themes!

WE WERE LIARS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Something terrible happened last summer, and I have no memory of what or who hurt me,” says the voice of Cadence Sinclair Eastman (Emily Alyn Lind) as we see her lying on a rocky shoreline late at night, obviously injured.

The Gist: At the beginning of “Summer 16”, i.e. when Cadence and her group of best friends — Gat Patil (Shubham Maheshwari), and her cousins Mirren Sinclair Sheffield (Esther McGregor) and Johnny Sinclair Dennis (Joseph Zada) — the Sinclairs gather for family pictures on Beechwood Island.

The island near Martha’s Vineyard has all of the houses of the massively-wealthy Sinclair family scattered around: Candence’s grandparents, Harris and Tipper Sinclair (David Morse, Wendy Crewson), Candence’s recently-divorced mother Penny Sinclair (Caitlin FitzGerald), Mirren’s mother Bess Sinclair (Candice King), and Johnny’s mother Carrie Sinclair (Mamie Gummer). Since her divorce, Carrie has been in a long-term relationship with Gat’s uncle Ed (Rahul Kohli).

The group is delighted when Gat shows up, as they thought he’d be in India. They met Gat during “Summer 8,” and Gat and Candence have been best friends ever since; the group has called themselves “The Liars” from the start. But there seems to be something extra going on between them at the start of this summer, even as they both try to still act like platonic besties when they’re around Johnny and Mirren.

The Sinclair sisters seem to be in their own world, with Penny’s divorce fresh in her mind, and Bess complaining that her husband barely pays any attention to her or other family matters. Meanwhile, a huge party boat in the bay gets the unwanted attention of Harris, but it motivates Johnny and Mirren to see how they can get on board.

Candence and Gat dance around their feelings for each other for the first few days, but after they arrange to watch a meteor shower by themselves, Gat chickens out when Johnny and Mirren get fake IDs to get on the party boat. But Candence soon finds out how Gat really feels. But what she doesn’t anticipate is what happens after that, or the fact that a year later, she won’t remember any of it.

PHOTO: Prime Video

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We Were Liars was adapted by Julie Plec and Carina Adly Mackenzie from E. Lockhart’s book of the same name. It certainly has the same overtones as Plec’s best known series The Vampire Diaries (but none of the vampires). There are also elements of other teen-oriented thrillers like Yellowjackets and One Of Us Is Lying.

Our Take:

The first episode of We Were Liars doesn’t even really get to the heart of what the show is about, namely that Candence goes back to Beechwood Island a year after her accident, with no knowledge of what happened, and no one can help her get to the truth. This includes anyone in her family, as well as the other members of The Liars. It even includes Gat, with whom we presume Candence had a whirlwind summer romance with before the accident but has been distant since.

So, while we generally stay on “Summer 16” in the first episode, and it pretty much sets itself up to show just what the storylines that summer will be, the rest of the series will likely switch between “Summer 16” and “Summer 17”, with the way we know what year it is being the color of Candence’s hair. We’re also sure there will be trips back to “Summer 8” to see the beginnings of Candence and Gat’s friendship.

While there are elements of this story that are entertaining to watch, most of this feels like the same tedious teen thriller material we’ve seen many times over the past five or so years. To be honest, we’re much more intrigued by the stories of the cousins’ parents — Penny, Bess and Carrie — than we are about the teens. The Sinclair sisters are living adult lives, not the low-stakes lives of privileged teens, and they all seem to be going through life upheavals. The interactions between FitzGerald, Gummer and King all crackle with the same sisterly energy we saw in shows like Bad Sisters. But, for most of the time, we’re stuck with the limp, almost obligatory-seeming friendship between these cousins and Gad.

Even the romance between Gad and Candence doesn’t seem all that believable. These are feelings that have likely been simmering in the background for years, only now brought to the surface because of the pair’s hormones and awareness that the other is attractive. But the way the first episode sets up Candence and Gad is boring and lacks chemistry. In fact, there are sitcom-like misunderstandings that delay the “big kiss” only slightly, and some repetitive scenes where Gad says things to Candence that he already said seconds earlier.

So is the show going to be about the kids’ secrets, the adults’ secrets, or both? The adults’ secrets, of course, are going to be much more interesting, but we get the feeling that the teens are going to keep being in the forefront, and we really don’t care much about seeing that.

PHOTO: Prime Video

Our Call: SKIP IT. While there are good performances and some interesting characters in We Were Liars, we were pretty bored with the nondescript teenage characters at the show’s center, and wanted to scream every time we heard Candence’s narration.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.