Fox and Imagine Entertainment's Lie To Me debuted Thursday. It stars Tim Roth as a consultant who specializes in determining when people are lying. Now, mind you, I thought mothers could figure that out pretty effectively on their own. My mother had a little finger that spoke to her, and my sister acquired one when she became a mother; it works reasonably well. My nephews asked me once if I also have one, and I told them that yes, I do, and I also have cats who observe all, and repeat everything they see. They are feline Sherlock Holmeses. (The nephews were more impressed by the talking finger).
Though it doesn't have a mother with a talking finger, Lie To Me is pretty entertaining. It posits a psychologist who can tell by observing facial reactions and physical behavior as well as listening to verbal cues whether someone is lying or telling the truth. Of course, as he and his colleagues tell people, there's more to it than that. One compares what people say and what they do. One examines physical evidence, for example. There's physical science involved, as well as social science. The protagonist here, Cal Lightman, isn't engaging in woowoo, nor is he asking those who hire him to take what he and his employees say on faith. Indeed, in the first episode the D.A. hires him to compile evidence that a suspect is guilty, and when he turns up some proof that said suspect might be innocent, the prosecutor threatens to blackens his name "just like what happens at the Pentagon." Nice touch. Not only does this suggest continuing tension between him and the D.A.'s office (showing that Lightman is a good guy), but it allows development of a back story (what did happen at the Pentagon?) Setting up this tension between the prosecutor and the consultant is an excellent idea, by the way. If the consultant and the D.A. were always in agreement about the guilt of the suspect, we'd have no drama, and no story. It also suggests that Lightman can't be bought, a good thing, since if your consultant can tell who's lying and who's telling the truth and he's on the take, you have a real problem. You have a consultant with "superpowers" who's a bad guy, Lex Luthor on the payroll of the Police Commissioner.
At any rate, the first episode includes one case in which a teen, a Jehovah's Witness, is accused of killing his high school English teacher. His parents, particularly his father, are not helping much with the defense. The mayor (the mayor?) wants to be certain that the boy is guilty before pressing for a life sentence. (This isn't the only weirdness in the plot. The series is set in DC, and for some reason the US Attorney is involved in the prosecution of this teen. We don't exactly know why. DC has its own system of courts).
Lightman doesn't require his staff to have "book learning." In the pilot, he and his number two hire a TSA employee who's a "natural" lie detector. Why is she so good? She tells them she's dated a lot of men. Ouch. Well, maybe she'll stand in for America's moms.
There's a certain amount of gender tension on the show, suggesting that these people who work together and who know how to read each other nevertheless may not communicate particularly well. Communication may not always be magic. Lightman pokes a certain amount of fun at his colleague Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams, formerly of The Practice) for liking romance novels and drinking slushies. She tells him to take some time off and lighten up. Torres, the new hire from the TSA, is amazed that he doesn't seem to care what anyone thinks of him and that he doesn't tell Gillian that her husband is lying to her. Gillian, amazingly, can't see that the husband is lying, either. But then, how often do we see that our loved ones lie to us? How often do we want to? Lightman says he doesn't care what people think of him. Apparently he doesn't work off the clock. But Torres may already be having some effect on Lightman, the divorced loner. At the end of the episode, as he leaves the building where he works, he sees a (married man) lying to his girlfriend. As the man leaves her, Lightman taps the woman on the shoulder....
The show's protagonist invites comparisons with CBS's The Mentalist and USA's Psych. Like The Mentalist's Simon Jayne, Cal Lightman is a wounded soul, although not quite as wounded as Jayne; Lightman still has a family living (he's divorced). His unwillingness to communicate seems somewhat forced and a little fake, but perhaps we'll see more explanation of that in episodes to come. Maybe he just doesn't like people because he thinks (or knows) that many of them lie. Jayne's is more understandable; after all "Red John" killed his wife and child. As for Shaun Spencer of Psych, well, apart from the fact that his parents divorced when he was in high school, and that his father is a little distant, I don't quite see what argument he has with life. Other people have had much more to overcome. As for the show's premise, both The Mentalist and Lie To Me depart from the premise that the protagonist is not and will not deceive his employer. Psych, of course, lets the viewer in on the scam, but that show is usually much more lighthearted than the other two. Can you imagine Simon Jayne or Cal Lightman investigating the death of a sea lion?
What I find even more interesting about Lie To Me as a series (apart from all the hype that it's a hit after one episode--Fox, please don't tell me that so soon), is that, of course, all the people who are representing liars and truthtellers are liars--they are actors, professional deceivers. Great fun. The website also offers up some games for the viewer to play to see if she can ferret out liars as well as Dr. Lightman and his posse.
On its own, the plot of the pilot represents average whodunit fare. What lifts it above the norm is Cal Lightman and his band of merry "mindreaders": the people who claim that, for a fee, they can figure out with a high degree of accuracy whether people are lying or telling the truth. Now, that's something prosecutors and defense counsel would like to take to the bank. If it were really were a dead cert, the legal system would no longer need judges or juries. We'd just ask Dr. Lightman and his buddies--or those talking fingers.
