How ‘Tell Me Lies’ Creator Meaghan Oppenheimer Captivated Audiences With Three Seasons of “Messy, Complicated Chaos”

Crafting all the twists, turns and bomb drops in Tell Me Lies would probably give the average person a migraine. But that wasn’t the case for the creative mind behind the toxic Hulu drama.

Though Meaghan Oppenheimer, the show’s creator, shrugs off the compliment, there aren’t many shows that have pulled off such a satisfying three-season story. Not only was she and her writing team juggling two timelines (starting in 2008 in college and ending in 2015 at a wedding) with an ensemble cast, but she was also tasked with finding ways to keep a savvy audience on their toes while keeping each character’s storyline fresh.

“My brain just works in a really twisty, worst-case-scenario way. I’m not well. I’m just not well,” Oppenheimer quips to The Hollywood Reporter. “And so coming up with the crazy storylines is not the hard part for me. The hard part is doing it in a way where the audience doesn’t predict everything, because we have a very smart audience.”

She continues, “Sometimes, though, I’m like, what show are you guys watching? Because some things that they predict, I’m like, that’s insane. You’re watching a different show.” Most of the pressure, she says, actually came from answering, “How do we keep this entertaining without it becoming silly and unrealistic and repetitive?”

Tell Me Lies is based on Carola Lovering’s 2018 novel of the same name, but the show notably deviates from the book, allowing Oppenheimer and her team to expand the narrative beyond Lucy and Stephen’s toxic relationship and into a messy and complicated friend group saga.

Without a doubt, she turned it into quite the drama that kept viewers continuously on the edge of their seats and often filled with rage (at one person in particular … ahem, Stephen). To this day, people still bring up on social media that iconic Diana (Alicia Crowder) and Stephen (Jackson White) stairs moment and the Lydia (Natalee Linez) reveal at the end of season one’s finale, which speaks to the show’s impact, since that premiered five years ago.

Oppenheimer tells THR that she feels accomplished with what they created, which was “really a deconstruction of a toxic, addictive relationship.” However, she admits that the series “really found itself” in season two as a really incredible ensemble piece.

“I always said, the moment I see a policeman investigating someone, we’ve turned it into a show it didn’t need to become,” Oppenheimer explains. “So I’m excited that the fan response and the fan response to other shows happening as well, like Heated Rivalry, really speaks to the fact that audiences want simple stories. They don’t always need a huge hook. They don’t always need a murder mystery. They just want stories that represent the messy, complicated chaos of their real lives.”

The creator adds, “So I hope that it opens a path for more shows that are just great soaps, because that’s what I want to watch. I want to watch people fuck and betray each other, and have their hearts broken and their hearts mended.”

The show’s success is even more evidence to prove Oppenheimer’s claims, as season three alone has consistently sat on Hulu’s Top 15 Series Today chart throughout its run. The show also appeared on the Nielsen charts for the week of its season three premiere on Jan. 13, scoring 391 million minutes of viewing.

Though fans are likely upset the show concluded with the season three finale, Oppenheimer promises that she, the cast and the crew thought long and hard about whether they could continue the lies, but ultimately that they all agreed, “I don’t think we’re going to beat this season.”

“My job has always been to protect the creative quality of the show over everything else, over a lot of other reasons you could make a decision. I wanted to make a creative decision, not a business decision. And I wanted this to be a complete story,” she explains. “It was always the question of, what happens to a group of friends who kind of come of age with this toxic dynamic at the center and what happens when they reunite years later? And we answered that.”

But Tell Me Lies fans shouldn’t fret too much because Oppenheimer — who has an overall deal with 20th Television, which produced the show — says she has “more stories coming,” and that “there is definitely room in the future for more stories in this world for spinoffs or things like that.”

All episodes of Tell Me Lies are currently streaming on Hulu. Check out all of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tell Me Lies season three coverage here.