The fact that I am writing about Lie to Me this evening means I’m eating crow. When the series started, I was giddy with anticipation. I was a huge Tim Roth fan, and all the buzz pointed to a great new show. Well, I was disappointed. In fact, during the first season, I stopped watching, stopped writing about it, and direly predicted that the show was doomed. Whoops! Not even some of the worst things about the show (as I thought then) are gone (namely, Loker and Torres, though things can change). But since the show has made it this far, I thought it would be worth taking another look.
I didn’t hate it.
Please bear with me — I am going to spend some time this week catching up on what I’ve missed, but I realize that I don’t know anything about what is going on between Lightman and his colleagues. So, I’ll focus on the main story rather than try to figure it all out tonight. Lightman is cozy with a female cop (Monique Gabriela Curnen) (he does note that he has cut his ties with the FBI). This proves helpful when he goes to his bank about his accounts and sees a man there acting odd. Naturally, Cal confronts him and asks him if he’s casing the joint. That is a jarring question even if you are not planning to rob a bank. The bank robber, Mike Salinger, is played by Shawn Doyle who is marvelous as Joey on Big Love.
Cal then meets with a skinny bank manager who tells him his accounts have been frozen. Cal slays him with: “First off. To you, Sandy, it’s DR. Lightman. Secondly, you’re about to get robbed.”
Even though Lightman shows him the security tapes, the manager doesn’t want to involve the police, insisting that all they have to go on is that the facial tic guy says so. Lightman is fine with that, so he just quietly enrolls the aid of his friend instead.
The whys and wherefores aren’t very important. Man was wronged by Big Money. Man wants revenge. Man is foiled by Cal Lightman. What is more important is Tim Roth’s kinetic energy. If I hadn’t had captions, I would have missed half of what he said. That would have really been a shame, because I stopped copying quotes when I realized that there would be too many to cite here. For example:
“Is this the Torres group already, or is it still the Lightman Group? Right.”
“End of the quarter? I mean, what do they think I’m writing here … a check?”
“She’s a 24-karat pit bull that one. But then, you already knew that didn’t you? Thanks for the heads up.”
And all of that was before the opening credits. I actually wrote down in my notes, “Frinetic, hard to understand accent — is he on coke?” I don’t remember the show being quite this fast-paced during the first season. And I don’t remember Lightman having such an extremely strong cockney accent.
I enjoyed bits where Salinger claims in the diner that he’s not talking, and Cal wryly tells him that he has been (his face has at least). Then, when Cal walks into the bar, Salinger says,
“How’d you find me?”
“Magic.”
For some reason, Lightman is a harder character for me to like than House is. Lightman strikes me as more of a prick, believe it or not. But I’m curious to know what the show has managed to accomplish since the early first season to keep in on the air, so I’ll continue to watch.
Clacked by Jen Creer
on Oct 05, 2010 @ 10:30 EST5EDT
I thought the show was complete and utter rubbish and still came back because some critics (I think Sepinwall) said the show is so good etc.
What I found is that the show started to come together after about seven or eight episodes. To me it looked like they re-tooled it after gettig audience feedback.
The show is really great. After I got past all the body language BS and simply suspended my disbelief, it became must-watch TV for me. I think what made it work is that they gave us characters that despised Lightman’s actions as much as we, the viewers, do, and then they were golden.
Firstly, season one was as good as 2 and 3, just a little less edgy..reason might be that lightman now thinks that he has protegees looking up to him, so he becomes the hard taskmaster.
Secondly, the show wasn’t re-tooled, tim roth had writer-problems now, in season 3 you can say he runs half the show, they(writers) keep him happy, know what i mean.
Thirdly, “viewers despise lightman’s acions?????? a big NO to that.
and where did you get that ‘…characters that despised Lightman’s actions’ ??? who cares, its the lightman group.
Explaination: Don’t Despise Lightman
He knows better than anyone, the world, he sees it in black and white, the lies and the ugly hidden behind the pretty faces and charming smiles.
He somewhat blames himself for not anticipating his mother’s suicide, it is more than he can bear. Only thing in the world that matters to him is his daughter and best friend foster both whom need protection, so to speak.(emily is teen and foster has emotional issues also he cares about her very much, foster in turn protects lightman in issues about his mom and ex-wife which are his weak spots)
so they are his (1) only family, (2) they need him, (3) He couldn’t bear if anything would happen to them on his watch(coz what happened to his mum)
Thus the reason for his being a tough nut, a bully, whom people would think twice to mess with.. he does it for others whom he cares about, not for himself coz only he see the true face of the world, he see’s it downright naked.
Regards
You must love abusive relationships ;-)
Tell me again how you made it through the first 8 episodes without hating Lightman’s guts? Who did you root for?
You basically write from a backwards perspective. When did you find out about the suicide? When did they introduce Torres’ rebellious behavior?
Sorry but you should really just re-watch the first season from the start.
Oh and by the way I didn’t say the first season was better or worse than the later ones. Especially because they now stopped production halfway through season 3 you’ll find that most likely they now gave the same thing going on they had in Season 1.
Oh I forgot – Lightman isn’t as much as a prick as Greg House. They used his daughter to make that clear on the show the later episodes of Season 1 and especially in Season 2.
Although you can say that House is likeably because of his love for Cuddy so I’d say they are head to head in that department :-)