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The disturbing new trend in TV drama, and what it means

Photo credit: HBO
Photo credit: HBO

From Digital Spy

“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all. What can we do then?”

So begins Chernobyl, as Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) records, in his suicide note, his experience of the nuclear power plant disaster that the Soviet Union tried to cover up.

Meanwhile, in modern-day Monterey, California, four of the lead characters in Big Little Lies meet in a cliff-side carpark to discuss how to maintain the lie they share, that the abusive Perry accidentally stumbled down the stairs to his death.

Photo credit: HBO
Photo credit: HBO

Elsewhere, in the new series of Killing Eve, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), continues to cover up her obsession with Villanelle (Jodie Comer), who lies, just like she kills, for the LOLs.

Lying is a central theme of so many of our current favourite TV shows – you might even say it's having a moment in the zeitgeist.

Though fiction is meant to offer us an escape from the real world of fake news, deception and untruths, we just can’t seem to look away from lies, liars and their consequences at the moment. The more the lies pile up, the more important truth becomes.

As Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin explains in the official podcast about his show: “When people choose to lie and when people choose to believe the lie… we can get away with it for a very long time, but the truth just doesn’t care… This was before our entire planet seemed to become engulfed on a war on truth."

Photo credit: HBO
Photo credit: HBO

Chernobyl and Big Little Lies were written, respectively, in 2015 and 2014, pre-empting the public interest in lies that would develop during Donald Trump’s run to become president, the Brexit referendum and #MeToo.

It’s no wonder that, in light of current socio-political events, shows where we get to see lies taken apart are appealing.

So why do people lie? People can lie to “gain power over others, to look good, to maintain status in society through make believe”, says psychologist Dr Susan Marchant-Haycox, aptly describing every meeting held by President Gorbachev in Chernobyl.

These lies are compelling: the series shows how a few cowardly words stacked up and caused a disaster that cut short hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.

Perry in Big Little Lies told lies for similar reasons – to cover up his shortcomings and facilitate further abuse. Now that Perry’s gone, the lies continue. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think people will stop talking” Celeste tells the others, meaning them, too. How will they keep the truth secret and what will the consequences of their cover-ups be?

Photo credit: Killing Eve - BBC
Photo credit: Killing Eve - BBC

Though these two shows deal with dark consequences of lies, Killing Eve plays with them. In the first episode of the new series, Villanelle and Eve are bound by their lies. The first lies in order to get medical help from the sorts of people she’d likely kill, while Eve lies about a dodgy oyster in order to hide the knife she stabbed her nemesis with.

There's a degree of empathy involved here, paradoxically: viewers aren’t bothered by lying protagonists as long as we understand why they’ve lied. Dr Marchant-Haycox says that, as well as habitual liars, “many normal people lie to hide the shame they feel about wrongdoings or because they fear the consequences of their mistakes.” In Big Little Lies, Chernobyl and, in Eve’s case in Killing Eve, we can see how lies are the only option.

In lying to the volunteers about their potential rewards in Chernobyl, Valery is trying to save not himself but all of Europe and much of Russia from a nuclear meltdown. He is a heroic liar.

Out of love for their children, Big Little Lies' Jane and Celeste lie about the hurt Perry has caused them.

Photo credit: Sky
Photo credit: Sky

(An uncomfortable truth is that, even though audiences are mature enough to stand by their flawed heroes, more people will understand Valery’s lies than the Monterey Five’s. No matter the combined talents of Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Zoe Kravitz, as women, they’ve got more work to do to win audiences over.)

Scale is where these shows really harness our interest in deceit. For one thing, a huge ensemble cast allows for multiple perspectives on the same events. The more languid pace of TV drama allows for a slower, more methodical poke around in the moral maze.

It’s no wonder that, in a constantly switched-on age, where we can readily scroll past news of concentration camps, of war-built famines, of violently extinguished protests, we value characters who realise that some people cannot handle the truth so immediately.

Dr Zoe Shacklock, associate lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, says: “At a time when everything is a soundbite, a 240-character tweet, there’s something appealing in looking at the longer narratives and the longer effects of the 15-minute meme cycle.”

In Chernobyl and Big Little Lies and, to some extent, Killing Eve, even the messiest and most complicated of truths will out, and will have the time and space to be told. As disturbing as that might seem, there is satisfaction in seeing the heroes who perhaps didn’t tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth… eventually get round to it.


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