Knife Edge Dark Tone

Meaghan Oppenheimer describes Tell Me Lies as an “elevated soap.”

“It’s a drama with elements of a thriller. It’s about what these people do to each other. How do we make a romance feel like it has life or death stakes?”

Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White) Photo by Disney/ Josh Stringer)

The dark tone in the show “should feel like there is an evil God looking down on our characters and laughing because it’s dark and so messed up. There’s a little bit of gleeful humor to a lot of it as we’re watching these characters make disastrous mistakes.”

The showrunner coins the terms “lethal humor” for Tell Me Lies which she inserts so that her show doesn’t feel so dreadful.

Theme

Tell Me Lies delivers a rollercoaster of tales, secrets, and lies. The thematic backbone of the season is “redemption and revenge” according to Meaghan Oppenheimer.

Writing Tell Me Lies

When Meaghan Oppenheimer originally sold the show to Hulu she wrote a thirty page bible to pitch it. She outlined the entire first season before she opened her writers’ room. During the development and writing process she made some broad-stroke notes about potential storylines for Season 2.

Lucy Albright (Grave Van Patten) Photo by Disney/ Josh Stringer

Much of this changed when it was time to break the second season. Certain storylines no longer seemed interesting or relevant to the trajectory of the show.

I knew there would be a bit more war between that Lucy and Stephen

Generally speaking, the writers tried to continue from where Season 1 left off. Future storylines were based on a ripple effect of the previous season. Here are the questions they discussed:

• What are the stakes for everyone?
• What does each character have to lose?
• What are their relationships?

The “blue sky” process took about three weeks where they “just threw ideas out.”

Meaghan had a “very vague idea of a season structure. I knew certain events that I needed to happen, but I didn’t always have all of the details behind every event.”

Meaghan Oppenheimer’s Advice For Writing YA

Typically, stories for this age group center around teenagers figuring out who they are and their place in the world, and making a lot of consequential mistakes in the process.

Meaghan Oppenheimer has a slightly different approach to the YA genre.

“I try to be as organic as I can to the characters. The main thing to make good YA is to take the characters and their problems seriously.” Avoid mocking these characters for their mistakes and never write them as caricatures.

“I think there’s this fallacy that relationships of that YA age aren’t important.” Oppenheimer suggests that although, “We’re probably not going to end up getting married to the people we date at twenty, those relationships are going to teach us how to love and how to set healthy boundaries.”

Tell Me Lies is all about creating empathy for YA characters in the same way as you would for adult characters.

“I think that YA audiences, for the most part, want to see stories about relationships, or a murder mystery.”

“The biggest stakes for most young adults, is their first time falling in love and their friendships. They don’t have their big careers yet. There are big stakes about who are they dating and who their friends are.”

Oppenheimer notes that the specific themes in YA are universal. “Even if you’re forty-five, you can still relate to the feeling of being heartbroken, devastated, and betrayed.”

“If you come from an organic place and you really let the characters drive the drama and let their choices drive the plot, as opposed to thinking, what’s the plot twist? you are going to appeal to a broader audience.“