When the television adaptation of the 2014 novel We Were Liars was released on June 18th, YA fans everywhere were ecstatic.
The adaptation of this novel into a series has been long awaited. The project’s development began after the book’s release. After being passed around by different studios and producers for a few years, it finally found a home at Amazon Prime in 2023.
I first read We Were Liars during its heyday on BookTok in 2020. The story’s twist shocked me in a way I can’t forget. I eagerly awaited the release of the show after this, so when I heard the adaptation was finally coming out, I was excited. I was most interested to see how the story would be translated from page to screen.
The protagonist of the show is Cadence Sinclair, the granddaughter of billionaire media mogul Harris Sinclair. She and her family spend each summer on a private island in New England called Beechwood. Over the years, Cadence, her cousins Mirren and Johnny, and Johnny’s brother Gat form an unbreakable bond.
The show follows the group, nicknamed “The Liars,” between two timelines—the summers before and after a terrible accident on the island. Cadence suffers an injury in the accident, and it causes her to lose her memory. As she tries to remember what happened that night, secrets and lies reveal themselves to her.
Too deep, or not deep enough?
We Were Liars is a story ripe with conflict, lies, and drama. But after watching the show, I felt that despite all the action, it didn’t live up to my expectations. Its focus on certain characters and plot lines over others led to the plot feeling drawn out and even boring at times. As a result of this, even when something exciting was happening, I felt very little suspense or tension.
The only thing that truly shocked me was the plot twist. Though I knew it was coming, I was still devastated by Cadence’s realization. It feels like the show relied on holding out on such a big twist to keep viewers watching until the end. Although it worked out, it made for a buildup that felt exciting at times and flat at others.
“We Were Liars” plot overview – spoilers ahead
Split between two timelines, the show follows the liars during Summer 16 and Summer 17. Summer 16 is the year that Cadence, Mirren, Johnny, and Gat are sixteen years old. It’s also the year when Cadence’s life changes forever after the accident.
At first, Summer 16 seems like any other. The cousins spend days at the beach fooling around, the moms bicker between themselves and fight for their fathers’ attention, and the family throws lavish, expensive parties for the whole island. That’s until Cadence’s Grandmother, Tipper, suddenly passes away.
While the family reels from the grief of Tipper’s death, the mothers and the liars get caught in conflict. Harris finds out that Tipper was lending money to their daughters, Bess, Penny, and Carrie, behind his back. Meanwhile, Gat and Cadence’s kindling romance comes to a halt when she finds out he has a girlfriend back home.
The summer progresses, and more lies rise to the surface, from substance abuse to cheating to attempted murder. As the characters try to conceal the truth about themselves from each other, they create divisions in the family that might never be repaired.
A divide begins to form between Cadence and Harris over her relationship with Gat. This makes her see the flaws in her family, specifically their wealth and privilege. A night of drinking and drama with her cousins reveals they all have similar feelings about the lies and entitlement so integral to their family. In a moment of passion, they decide to set their family home on fire as an act of rebellion. But at the end of the night, Cadence wakes up on the beach, alone, with no memory of what happened.
The twist of summer 17
Upon her return to the island for Summer 17, Cadence is determined to figure out what happened to her. Everyone around her refuses to tell her the truth because the doctors said it’d be better for her to remember on her own. When she arrives on the island, Cadence confronts the liars, who didn’t reach out to her while she was in the hospital after the accident. She spends the whole summer with them trying to investigate the truth.
In the last episode, we learn that Gat, Johnny, and Mirren all died in the house fire at the end of Summer 16. Cadence narrowly escapes, but gets blown into the water when the house explodes from the flames. All of Summer 17, she was speaking to the ghosts of her cousins and Gat.
How ‘We Were Liars’ tackles generational trauma
Something I enjoyed about We Were Liars was the relationships between the mothers and daughters. While there is plenty of fighting and bickering between the moms themselves, there’s also drama between them and their children.
Mirren’s mom, Bess, is a cookie-cutter stay-at-home mother to a husband who doesn’t appreciate her. When we learn that Tipper was giving her daughters money behind Harris’s back, Harris tells Bess that her trust fund is depleted as well. Bess is shocked because she hasn’t touched her trust fund, so she confronts her husband. After trying to lie to her, he admits to taking money from it behind her back to make up for losses at work.
This revelation leads her to reevaluate not only her role as a wife but as a mother. She thinks about the things she wanted as a young adult; she had dreams of traveling the world, leaving her hometown, and seeking a life for herself. But in pursuit of being the “perfect daughter,” she stayed in her hometown, lived near her parents all her life, and married young.
Instead of evaluating her actions, she begins to take her frustration out on Mirren. When she begins a relationship with a boy on the island, her mother is disgusted by her actions. But Mirren soon realizes that she’s jealous of her freedom and her ability to take her life into her own hands. The two have a fight where Bess blames Mirren for her unhappiness. Mirren yells back at her and says, “I didn’t ask for you to waste your life on me…You choose to be a mother.”
Mother Dearest
This scene shows the difficulties of the relationship between a parent and their child. Specifically, it highlights how the complexity of womanhood can impact a mother’s bond with her daughter. Technically, Bess had the choice of whether or not to be a mother. But the pressure of the social conventions placed on women forced her into a life she didn’t want. If she chose not to be a mother, what would her parents have thought? How would it have affected her trust fund? Would her family even accept her?
Even still, it doesn’t justify how she treats Mirren. Mirren grew up watching her mother resent the life she chose for herself, and decided she wanted something different. But her mother resents that. We see this jealousy manifest as anger when her mother starts throwing her paintings around in rage.
This scene is one of my favorites from the show. It’s able to portray this complicated bond with tact and emotion. The show does a great job of portraying generational trauma and the complicated relationships that result from it. It’s also able to show how this trauma manifests in a wealthy, privileged family.
While the parents love their children, they also love their wealth and privilege. Sometimes, the preservation of their status comes before their children’s well-being. And once The Liars finally realize this, they try to rebel by setting the house on fire. In doing so, “We Were Liars” depicts a deeply flawed family, whose attempts to put on a facade only tore them apart.
Cadence and Gat: too much or not enough?
The complex relationships between family members deeply captivated me, but I feel like we didn’t get enough of it. Instead, the show lingered on meaningless plots and drawn-out conflict.
I—controversially—felt this way about Cadence’s and Gat’s relationship. They packed the first four episodes full of romantic back-and-forth between the two. One moment, they were head over heels, the next they couldn’t look at each other. While it was sweet to watch them fall in love, the constant back and forth left me more confused than eager to keep watching.
The most interesting part of their relationship is when they finally start dating, and Harris begins to treat both Gat and Cadence differently. Cadence realizes how racist Harris is, and how her privilege shielded her from how Gat was treated by her family.
Other than that, there was very little keeping me engaged in Gat and Cadence’s romance. There’s not much build, and tons of unnecessary time between them. The focus on their relationship over other romantic and interpersonal ones leaves the other plots feeling shallow.
I felt similarly about some of the moms’ plot lines. While I do think the choice to add in more background about the moms was a good one, some of it felt unnecessary. For example, Bess is caught cheating on her husband with a man who works at the boat yard. While scandalous, it felt it had very little effect on the plot or her actions.
Conclusion: “We Were Liars” is good, devastating fun.
We Were Liars is a complicated show, with plenty of twists and turns to keep you coming back. While the cast of characters has enough drama to keep you engaged, the focus on Gat and Cadence, as well as other meandering plots, sometimes takes away from the complexity that makes the show so interesting.
If you love devastating twists, summer romance, and rich people drama, this is the show for you. But if you’re looking for a show with a focus on deeper, more complex relationships, this might not be your cup of tea. Overall, the show was a fun watch, and I don’t regret spending my time on it. I just wish there were more of what made the story so engaging.
