Tell Me Your Secrets, an entire symphony of evil

Lily Rabe in Telll Me Your Secrets

Tell Me Your Secrets is a complex crime series streaming on Prime Video. It operates on the premise that if you keep throwing every known evil at the cast and most of it sticks, you soon have a suspenseful tale to tell.

Tell Me Your Secrets has serial murderers, a serial rapist, many liars, sexual abusers, baby stealers, egg stealers, blackmailers, obsessed and fanatical mothers – all leavened with numerous types of mental illnesses. A hodgepodge of bad guys.

Amy Brenneman and Elliot Fletcher in Tell Me Your Secrets
Mary’s son Jake (Elliott Fletcher) helps run his mom’s foundation for missing girls

At the top of the cast are two women: Amy Brenneman is a grieving mom searching for a missing daughter. She’s been missing for 7 years. Mary (Brenneman) has a whole organization devoted to locating her daughter.

Mary thinks a serial killer named Kit (Xavier Samuel) knows what happened to her daughter. He dies and his former girlfriend Karen (Lily Rabe) gets out of prison. She goes into witness protection under the name Emma.

 Lily Rabe in Tell Me Your Secrets

Karen/Emma has memory loss. She doesn’t remember what actually happened with Kit and the women he killed. She’s under the care of a weird psychiatrist from Witness Protection, Pete (Enrique Murciano). They work to recover her memories.

Pete installs her in a Louisiana town where he has history. The town is full of evil secrets, missing girls, and a hair salon where Emma finds a job.

There are too many subplots to detail here. The main storyline involves Mary searching for Emma so she can get information about her daughter out of her. To find someone in Witness Protection, she hires a reformed rapist.

Hamish Linklater in Tell Me Your Secrets
Hire a rapist to find a woman – sort of logical . . .

The rapist is John (Hamish Linklater). He brings his own brand of mental illness into every episode, but he’s surprisingly good at following the clues to Emma’s location.

Tell Me Your Secrets was created by Harriet Warner. Most of the episodes were directed by women: Houda Benyamina, Louise Friedberg, Cherie Nowlan, Lisa Siwe, and Daisy von Scherler Mayer. It didn’t feel created by women. It was too full of darkness, illness, and needed a few more characters with redeeming qualities.

Lily Rabe is fit and strong. She looks like she should be leading a professional athletic team to victory in some stadium. She doesn’t look like a hairdresser or a woman who would be seduced by a serial killer into believing he was a good guy. Not until the final scenes when she’s preparing herself for what could be a second season, does Lily Rabe feel like the right woman for this part. She’s a good actress – I’m not saying she does a bad job here. But her character should have been written to fit her better.

I thought the series was slow to build to the tension needed to keep interest going. There were too many subplots involving too many kinds of disgusting people with disgusting secrets. Less would have been more.

The poster for Tell Me Your Secrets

Check out the previews.

Does this sound interesting to you? If you watched it, do you want to see more?

6 thoughts on “Tell Me Your Secrets, an entire symphony of evil”

  1. christopher a swaby

    what does a hairdresser look like?

    there was an awful lot going on in this series. it wasnt until the last two or three episodes that you find a main character for whom to root. and the ending left virtually everyone alive – i cant think of a single plot that was resolved. the ratings apparently werent great so a second season doesnt seem a given. i would watch a second season on the strength of the acting, which was excellent across the board, but only bc i want to see the story resolved.

    1. Good question about the hairdresser. I don’t know the answer. You calling me on my stereotyping, Christopher?

      If there is a second season it’s going to be a whole different vibe.

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