Tell Me Lies is back with more sex, secrets, and (surprisingly) substance

The summer of toxic love continues: After a truly perplexing press tour for It Ends With Us, the domestic-abuse drama oddly marketed as a floral-filled, Blake Lively-led romance, Hulu’s Tell Me Lies returns after a two-year hiatus with its own warning tales of relationship toxicity, gauzed over with some Gossip Girl 2.0 gloss. (Fittingly, that reboot’s resident hunk, Thomas Doherty, enrolls in the university drama for season two.)  

Season one of Tell Me Lies revolved around the neg-heavy, nausea-inducing “love story” between bright-eyed college coed Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and her borderline-sociopathic beau Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), casting their problematic coupling and frequent sex scenes in such a warmly lit glow that it bordered on glorification. (Van Patten and White dating IRL doesn’t help hinder fans from shipping their characters.) But the second season does a fine job establishing that destructive fuck-boy behavior can lurk in less obviously nefarious corners. “Why am I so attracted to these fucked up guys?” Lucy laments to BFF Pippa (Sonia Mena) during a mid-season smoke session. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Pippa commiserates, before blow-horning this season’s main takeaway: “How are we supposed to know someone is dangerous when we first meet them?” 

Sure, the sheer amount of toxic masculinity (overt and otherwise) that Lucy, Pippa, fellow bestie Bree (Catherine Missal), and the rest of the underclasswomen at Baird College endure in one mere semester can seem fantastical—that is, if you’ve never stepped foot onto a college campus, with its messy frat parties, shared-dorm tensions, and closed-door office hours. 

Tell Me Lies season two thrusts viewers right back into that charged atmosphere, picking up shortly after the explosive events of the first-season finale as Lucy begins her sophomore year. As with its previous batch, the narrative structure jumps between the character’s school years—in this case, September 2008, with all of the early-generation iPhones and MGMT needle drops the era requires—and seven years later, at the drama-filled nuptials of Bree and her college boyfriend Evan (Branden Cook). But it’s in the earlier period that the series really thrives, effectively capturing the hyper-intimacy and ever-changing group dynamics of college friends. (For example, due to their social circle, both Lucy and Pippa are regularly forced to hang out with their respective exes—Stephen and Spencer House’s Wrigley—to varying degrees of enjoyability.)  

It’s through that ensemble that the show expands both its focus and the fallout of those titular deceptions. With all of the main story beats from Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name—on which the show is based—attended to in the first season, series creator Meaghan Oppenheimer & Co. have plenty of room to play with season two, including introducing new characters like Doherty’s Leo, a decidedly less vile love interest for Lucy, and Oliver, a very hot Baird professor (played by Oppenheimer’s very hot actor-husband Tom Ellis) who catches Bree’s eye. It also allows space for unexpected unions and deeper connections between returning players.The banter and bond between Mena’s Pippa and House’s Wrigley is especially convincing, with both characters movingly dealing with their fair share of trauma and guilt. 

The weak link, ironically, is the show’s juiciest sell: that incessant and often infuriating push-and-pull between Lucy and Stephen. Graciously, season two sees Lucy more often with revenge on the mind than romance when it comes to her ex, a welcome reprieve for those of us who spent season one shouting, “Lucy, you in danger, girl!” in full Whoopi Goldberg voice at the TV each week. But there is no rest for the wicked, so even when they’re not actually together, Stephen is never too far, with a slight or barbed bit of gaslighting ready on the tongue. (“Why do you insist on being the most annoying person in every room, Stephen?” one character sharply sums it up.) 

Despite White’s game villainy, however, Stephen’s near-cartoonish manipulations pale in comparison to the already terrifying and sadly recognizable everyday exploitations that the young women experience this season: waking up drowsy and unclothed in a bedroom you don’t recognize, watching your prince charming devolve into a violent brute, and having no one believe you when you cry wolf. If you were raised on a diet of Fifty Shades and, yes, Colleen Hoover books, then sure, all of the pulpy car wrecks, steamy hook-ups, and years-long treacheries will continue to titillate. But Tell Me Lies remains at its best when it tells us truths.

Tell Me Lies season 2 premieres September 4 on Hulu