We Were Liars Review
Director: Erica Dunton, Tara Miele, Julie Plec, Nzingha Stewart
Date Created: 2025-06-18 22:32
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We Were Liars Review: This mystery drama series is directed by Erica Dunton, Tara Miele, Julie Plec, Nzingha Stewart. It is an 8-episode limited series and it is adapted from the best-selling young adult novel by E. Lockhart. The series boasts solid ensemble cast like, Emily Alyn Lind plays Cadence and is accompanied by Shubham Maheshwari, Esther McGregor, Joseph Zada, Caitlin FitzGerald, Mamie Gummer, Candice King, Rahul Kohli, and David Morse. The show tells the tale of a teenage girl who returns to her family’s exclusive island to learn about the traumatic event that caused her to lose her memory.
We Were Liars Review
The show is visually stunning. The island, the mansions, the beach — it all appears to have been torn directly from a postcard. But beyond that, that’s where the beauty stops. Prime Video’s We Were Liars simply can’t manage to develop anything that feels like real tension, at least not to my taste that I demand out of a mystery drama like this.
The initial few episodes establish the mystery well enough, but the pace is infuriatingly slow. I found myself waiting for something big, for a character to catch me off guard or a story to sweep me up. But instead, it just plods along, filled with moody stares, gauzy flashbacks and far too many scenes of repetitive saying the same thing over and over.
The episode hangs on the shoulders of its lead, Cadence played by Emily Alyn Lind. But all this crying and getting lost and all, she wasn’t exactly easy to feel for. The show needs her to be deep and broken, but it doesn’t give us enough to care about her. She’s also got a couple of misfires in scenes with Gat (Shubham Maheshwari). It could have been sweet — Gat is one of the few characters of colour in a show about a white privileged family — but the chemistry between them is just not strong enough.
In fact, all the characters in We Were Liars on Prime Video are kind of flat or unlikeable. They’re wealthy, fiery and spend all their time keeping secrets or being aloof. I know the series  is set in a wealthy family and their problems just beyond the reach of others, but the absence of warmth or humanness makes it hard to care what happens to them.
My biggest gripe with Prime Video’s We Were Liars series is that the story is drawn out too long. The main mystery could have been unravelled in half the time. Rather, we end up with eight long episodes of repetitive scenes and manipulated emotional moments. The twist revelation at the end — no spoilers here — is intended to shock us, but because the show takes such a long time to be mysterious (and sluggish), it doesn’t have the oomph that it needs. Rather than being swept up, I merely felt exhausted and was ready for it to end.
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Cadence and Gat’s romance is supposed to be the emotional core of the series, and it just doesn’t work for me. Their romance is just such a plot device, rather than anything real, or realistic. The Gat character I also didn’t feel was well-written A character intended to symbolise diversity in an otherwise white family could have been so much more. But instead, he’s frequently confused, passive and just flat-out forgettable.
To that, the show attempts to examine themes of race, class and family disintegration, but all of these feel shallow. None of these are explored with anything greater than superficial interest. It’s like the show wants to be making a big statement but doesn’t know how to make that statement effectively.
The actors do their best. Emily Alyn Lind does have some good moments, and the other actors do their best with the script. But overall, the acting is not strong enough to rescue the poor writing. You can see that the show is trying to be emotional and complicated, but overall everything turns out to be melodramatic, instead of soulful.
Prime Video We Were Liars Review: Summing Up
Overall, We Were Liars is a show with a solid concept, stunning visuals, and a best-selling book to draw upon. But it stumbles on pretty much every level. A meandering plot with unlikeable characters (for real, I could not relate to them whatsoever) with a mystery that’s too slowly unfolding. For book readers, there might be something enchanting here. But for someone like myself, who came into it with no further hopes, this series is more like a really long and incredibly passionate lecture that forgot to be engaging.
We Were Liars 2025 is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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