6 Shows to Stream Now That ‘Tell Me Lies’ Is Over For Good
Hulu’s addictive drama about the toxic entanglement between Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White) wrapped for good when its season 3 finale aired on Feb. 17. Creator Meaghan Oppenheimer announced on Feb. 16, while the season was still airing, that this would be the show’s last.
“I felt like the story had reached its natural conclusion, and I really didn’t want it to become something else,” Oppenheimer told Variety. “This story, to me, was always a closed-ended story. It has a beginning, middle and end. This was always a question of what happens to this friend group when there’s a poisonous dynamic at the center? And what happens when they reunite years later? So I felt like this should be the ending.”
Oppenheimer added: “The fans are so loud and loyal, and that’s kind of all you can hope for. We definitely talked about whether there are any other organic ways to move forward. We just kept coming back to the same thing: It felt like anything else would feel like an epilogue.”
The particular cocktail Tell Me Lies served — messy relationships, buried secrets, characters you love to hate — isn’t easy to replicate. But these six shows each deliver a version of that fix, and a few might already be sitting in your watchlist untouched.
‘Normal People’
If the emotional push-and-pull between Lucy and Stephen kept you watching through your fingers, the dynamic between Marianne and Connell in Normal People will hit a familiar nerve. The show traces their complicated relationship from high school through college, built on missed timing, class tension, and the kind of intimacy that’s hard to shake.
It’s based on Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name. The adaptation leans into long silences and small gestures rather than big dramatic reveals. The pacing is slower than Tell Me Lies, which makes it a good palette cleanser if you want the emotional intensity dialed to a different frequency. Stream it on Hulu.
‘You’
Where Tell Me Lies lets you watch toxicity unfold from the outside, You drops you directly inside the mind of it. The show follows Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a self-proclaimed nice guy whose relationships with women begin with obsession and escalate into stalking. The unsettling part is how the show makes you understand his logic, even when his actions are horrifying.
All five seasons are on Netflix, so there’s a deep well to draw from if you’re looking for a longer commitment.
‘Big Little Lies’
The title similarity is a coincidence, but the thematic overlap is real. Big Little Lies and Tell Me Lies share DNA in how they handle harmful infidelities, buried secrets, and the way people weaponize information against each other.
This HBO Original dark comedy-drama peels back the surface of several wealthy Monterey, California families to reveal that their seemingly perfect facades are hiding actions and information with the power to completely unravel the lives of those around them. Past traumas and current abuses build across the season and culminate in a sudden death that implicates five women in the community, played by Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern and Zoë Kravitz. . The ensemble cast alone makes it worth queuing up.
‘Cruel Summer’
If the crime-drama thread running through Tell Me Lies hooked you as much as the messy interpersonal dynamics, Cruel Summer operates in a similar space. This mystery thriller anthology series tells different compelling stories across its two-season run, each one structured around timelines that slowly reveal what really happened.
The first season is set in Texas from 1993 to 1995 and follows a socially awkward teen girl (Chiara Aurelia) who suddenly blossoms and rises in the social ranks after a popular classmate (Olivia Holt) disappears. The second season takes place between 1999 and 2000 and follows three teens who become involved in a tangled love triangle that leaves one dead and the other two as suspects. The anthology format means each season stands on its own, so you can start with whichever premise grabs you.
‘We Were Liars’
Based on a book by E. Lockhart, We Were Liars centers on Cadence Sinclair, who has trouble remembering an accident she was in on her family’s private island. The show operates on a slow drip of information, letting you piece together what happened alongside Cadence.
Fair warning: the ending on this one demands your full attention. It’s the kind of reveal that reframes everything you’ve watched.
‘Gossip Girl’
This 2000s teen drama delivers relationship drama, backstabbing, layered characters, and an ominous anonymous blogger chronicling all of it. The tone is more glamorous and soapy than Tell Me Lies, but the underlying mechanics are the same: people protecting secrets, leveraging power, and making destructive choices that ripple through their social circles.
The original show also birthed a reboot of the same name, and has a spinoff in the works. You can stream both the original and the 2021 reboot on HBO Max.
Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.
