Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1 is the first season of the psychological thriller crime drama streaming TV series created by Harriet Warner. The series revolves two women who are tragically connected to each other through a serial killer. Karen Miller (Lily Rabe) was the girlfriend of convicted mass murderer Kit Parker (Xavier Samuel) and Mary Barlow (Amy Brenneman) is the mother of a missing young woman who is suspected to be one of Parker’s victims.
Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1 is mainly concerned with Barlow’s attempts to discover the whereabouts of Miller, who has been re-located under a FBI witness protection programme, re-named Emma Hall. Barlow hires a convicted rapist John Tyler (Hamish Linklater) to accomplish that specific task. A solid intriguing premise that unfortunately gets bogged down by increasingly silly plot ideas in order to fill up a 10-episodes series. Let’s find out why.
S P O I L E R S
Unfortunately, in an attempt to keep the interest level of the audience high, the folks behind Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1 felt it necessary to pack the series with as many disturbing characters and convoluted plot lines as possible. As it is, the main characters (viz. Miller, Barlow and Tyler) are all rather unlikeable in their own way and right off the bat, the audience engagement is under serious threat.
There is a simmering sub-plot concerning an abuse of teenage girls in St. Jerome’s (the town where Miller has been residing) and somehow the psychiatrist in charge of Miller’s care viz. Peter Guillory (Enrique Murciano) is implicated in this dodgy scheme as well. How Guillory managed to convince the FBI to allow him free rein over Miller is frankly incredible!
READ OUR ANALYSIS OF TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1
Then there is the psychotic Tyler who is presented as a super-villain psychopath with the ability to virtually do anything! Tyler’s intelligence is off the chart and he makes his merry way across America in pursuit of Miller’s new identity and location. However, all Tyler’s effort is somewhat undone when a teenage (!) girl alerts Barlow of Miller’s whereabouts – all that hassle for nothing!
Miller herself is a piece of work. Convenient memory lapses excuse her blatant lies and the series presents her as some hapless victim. Is she a reliable narrator? Even Barlow – for all her grief and righteous suffering – is developed into a sociopath that will do anything to achieve her ends, even murder.
READ OUR REVIEWS OF THE UNDOING
Not only that but after jerking the audience around for nine episodes, we discover that Barlow’s daughter Theresa is neither missing or murdered but is in fact Parker’s partner-in-crime all along! Huh? It seems that Miller’s discovery of this fact was the traumatic event that caused her amnesia. Of course, nobody saw that coming as it was totally unearned without any seeding prior to the revelation. What a silly outcome to a strong premise! Sigh.
Worse still, the final episode of Tell Me Your Secrets sets up a second season in the most incomprehensible manner. If it’s as bad as Season 1, we would recommend that you skip putting Tell Me Your Secrets on your binge list and that’s no secret!
… still there’s more …