Meaghan Oppenheimer is a Hollywood showrunner with a husband, an infant, three stepkids and a dynastic family polo ranch on the outskirts of Tulsa, Okla. Despite these dignified badges of adulthood, she can still tell you the last time she cried at a bar over a boy.
“It was here, 10 years ago,” Oppenheimer says, taking in the musk of Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. The beloved local chain of dive bars has been usurped in recent years by Gen Z, looking for cheap well drinks and a staff that won’t call the cops if seven people are vaping under a table. “But I haven’t cried in bars since I got married.”
Thankfully, her memory is long. It’s what powers her sensational Hulu series “Tell Me Lies,” a sexually charged drama about college kids who play the devastating, consequential mind games of “Dangerous Liaisons” atop sheets by Bed Bath & Beyond. Based on Carola Lovering’s novel, Oppenheimer and her writers have expanded the book’s world of Stephen (Jackson White) and Lucy (Grace Van Patten) to include a robust cast of coeds. Stephen is pure toxic masculine evil in baggy jeans, carrying on a secret relationship with a wide-eyed Lucy over the show’s first season — only to dump her at its end and frame her as a lovesick stalker. Their group of friends is caught in the crosshairs and hiding secrets of their own — like drunk-driving deaths, cross-generational affairs with married professors, same-sex attractions, cheating (academic and of-the-heart) and date rape, to name a few — throughout the just-concluded second season.
These are characters who destroy each other for practice, trying on adulthood with little care for the steep price they may someday pay. And it makes for glorious, urgent, expertly paced television.
“We don’t take young adult stories seriously, but those are the years that you’re creating who you’re going to be,” Oppenheimer says. “That’s when I started to realize maybe I’d done something that has impacted me or others in a permanent way. That my future could have been happier if I didn’t make a certain choice.”
Part of the show’s magic is its setting: the late aughts, with flash-forwards to 2015. It allows its characters freedom from the bent necks of the present, where smartphones have eroded privacy and secrets aren’t easily kept. Some have been tempted to compare it to the jaw-dropping hedonism of “Euphoria,” but another trick up the show’s sleeve is how it mines the banality of student life for the pathos underneath. It’s a relief, Oppenheimer says, to be spared the burden of writing about contemporary college students, who exist in a hypersensitive, overly connected world.
“I’m concerned for some young people. It will be a rude awakening when they realize they cannot protect themselves from getting hurt or offended. Things are problematic, and we have to be able to see that on TV,” she says.
Not that Gen Z audiences don’t love the show. “Tell Me Lies” has grown a devout TikTok following, with millions of uploads parsing the drama of these broken relationships. The series also centers conversations around healthy sex, presenting situations that elevate the female orgasm and promote consent for a younger generation that studies find is increasingly abstinent. Oppenheimer and her creative team (which includes executive producer Emma Roberts) offer up these themes in a way that’s not didactic, but is excessively watchable.
Oppenheimer feels the show’s biggest cultural contribution is to shatter a type of illusion around a character like Lucy, in a world that’s “way too hard on women.” An obsession of hers on the script page is “humiliation. That’s something I wanted to bring from the book into the show. Too many shows have female leads that are complicated or antiheroes, but they’re always so cool.”
A second round of cocktails is delivered to the table, as 20-somethings nearby shout over a jukebox about credit card debt and dating apps.
“What’s refreshing about Lucy is that she allows herself to be completely undermined and belittled for the sake of a relationship,” Oppenheimer says. “That’s honest.”