What if you took a bunch of morally questionable psychologically traumatized individuals, threw them into a Louisiana swamp and set the entire mess to boil? Well, you might get Tell Me Your Secrets out of it. A TV show that is as good as the best of the mystery thrillers out there. Albeit not perfect and more on this later.
But first, let's give some credit where credit's due. It takes a lot of ingredients to cook up a good mystery, many people get some or most of it right and that's why there are so many mediocre ones out there. But TMYS gets almost every single thing right. The mystery here is very mysterious indeed, aided by an unreliable narrator, a woman who literally can't remember some of her life and people desperately hungry for that very same biographical information. The suspense is expertly maintained throughout, stretched over time and space and place and different, separate, but increasingly interconnected, characters. The mystery actually builds upon itself as it unravels. It's so good, it draws you in and refuses to let go, like a proper Louisiana swamp, and though there might be crocs or other killers around, you're in it to stay. But those are all the things you might say about a book version of TMYS and this is a different medium altogether. And the visual aspect of it is just as good as the plot. All three leads shine. And I mean, shine. The always talented and frequently sidelined (The Undoing, anyone, what a thankless role) Broccoli/Lily Rabe finally gets to be a leading lady and what a formidable one she turns out to be. And not just because she gets strikingly ripped for this role and when I say strikingly, the opening shot of her has her sporting 300 style abs. And the rest of her body is built, muscled and sculpted in a way you normally find in professional female athletes. It's almost an overkill for the role, but then again understandable for a woman who no longer wishes to be a victim. Because victim is how Rabe's character starts out, her life thrown off track by the love for the wrong man. Just how wrong? Well, serial killer wrong, brutal slayer of nine women. She gets convicted alongside for...something, but not much of something apparently due to her memory thing and next thing you know it's four years later and somehow she is out on parole and in witness protection, in a new place, under a new name, Emma, and under a claustrophobic care of a mysteriously motivated psychologist. Emma's got strict rules to follow and a narrow road to walk to freedom, but life just gets in a way. All the sh*tty aspects of it. And there's plenty of those to be found in the creepy backwoods, no, strike that, backwaters of a small Louisiana town. Meanwhile, there's Mary. A wealthy Texan who believes her daughter, Theresa, was one of Emma's former bf's victims. Mary operates an organization for crime victims and helps others, but is helpless when it comes to her own life. Theresa disappeared seven years ago and Mary's been slowly unraveling since, just awaiting a catalyst. Which arrives in a tall lanky form of John Tyler, a convicted rapist, who has since reformed himself through mantras and affirmations and now wishes to contribute to society by helping women avoid men like him. Mary ropes him into helping her track down Emma, convinced Emma knows her daughter's fate and that lights a fuse under the entire situation. There's a very good chance all the actors here just waited for TMYS to come along to unleash their talents. Amy Brenneman's Mary is positively magnetic in her grief and desperation as a woman who finds herself steadily and dramatically tipping over to the dark side. And Linklater's Tyler is a creep for the ages. You can practically observe his surface charisma slide in and out of place as his circumstances continue to defeat the precarious equilibrium he has so laboriously created for himself. John Tyler fights his darkest urges on daily basis and emerges on the winning side less and less as the show progresses, until he gives up altogether and just unleashes himself. Linklater is positively magnetic in the role. And it's crazy to think that Lnklater and Rabe are actually a real life longtime couple, it kind of creates a different perspective to some of the crazy scenes they have together. Anyway, that's the basic plot outline. There's much more to it, but it'd take ages to go into it all. Suffice it to say, there are many fascinating side characters with many fascinating (and often evil) motivations of their own. Suffice it to say, it all works and oh so well. For nine episodes, Out of ten. So please quit reading this review if you've not yet watched the show. Go watch the show. Then, maybe come back. Still here? Ok, let's talk about the final episode. First off, I was really hoping this was a miniseries, it would work so well as a miniseries, one mystery told in ten episodes and done. But no, that just isn't where the money's at, so the show got dragged out. But the thing is, until the final episode and even midway through it, it was so easily wrappedupable as a self contained unit. You can always tell the exact moment the decision was made to stretch it out and to do so some critical decisions were made. First and foremost, a lot of perfectly excellent internal logic got abandoned (why are they people watching the toddler never watch the news? why not report a deadly assault by a convicted rapist? ). Secondly, it was established that none of the characters apparently can die, not a one, no matter how grievously injured they might be. They just get up like Terminators and continue on. Thirdly, where'd Emma get an RV and why an RV? Not exactly a stealthy killerhunting vehicle. And Mary? Mary? What are you doing? This is all the more striking, because the show was otherwise so freaking good. And then it was like this very calculated...let's unravel as much as we can and leave as many things uncertain as possible and they'll have to renew for season two. And they probably will renew. And most likely I'll watch, because the acting alone is just so very good. Plus you gotta love a show that so comfortably rests its weary bones upon such spectacularly messed up individuals. I'll say one more thing, the only thing that threw me about casting and didn't ring quite right...and this is in no way should negate how much I enjoyed Rabe's performance and how good of a job she did. But...her character should have been younger. Rabe's 38 and looks more or less like a well maintained and awesomely fit woman in mid 30s. She doesn't have that celebrity thing where she permanently looks ten years younger or, like her Undoing costar Kidman, doesn't age at all. Which would make her character something like 30 when she meets and loves her serial killer and that seems off somehow for both him and her. For him, because he has obviously shown predilection for younger women. For her, because this sort of mad romance usually works for young people, maybe early 20s or so. (You know, like Theresa. Theresa and Kit, that's reasonable). Before the world weariness and reason, before life beats that out, etc. So maybe Rabe's playing someone much younger or maybe she's just written that way, but it does seem somewhat logically inconsistent and it stood out for me. Then again, maybe I just don't know enough about amour fou for serial killers. At any rate, this was 9.5 out of 10 episodes of mystery excellence. And 10 out of 10 on a dramatic scale for this terrific meditation on how much we don't know about people we love. With star making career high level performances by a very talented cast. No go...learn their secrets.
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