Remember when movies and TV shows billed as “sleazy” actually lived up to sleaze’s promise? No one else does, either, which at least makes the faux-sordid veneer splashed across Harriet Warner’s “Tell Me Your Secrets” less disappointing: If nothing that aspires to sleaziness manages to get there, then we can forgive one show for half-assing an attempt at dirtbag storytelling. Failure is failure, though, and “Tell Me Your Secrets,” its scattered better merits aside, makes a mess of itself by opting away from grime and leaning hard on a tangle of interwoven plot threads written to emphasize the series’ title. The protagonists have secrets, but hoo boy, they’re not the only ones!
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The number of ways Warner stuffs excess meaning into the basic conceit of “Tell Me Your Secrets” ends up dominating the areas where that meaning should carry the most weight. The show centers on three people: Kate (Lily Rabe), rechristened “Emma” as she embarks on a new life in witness protection, Mary (Amy Brenneman), head of a foundation that tracks down missing children and a grieving mother carrying a torch for her own lost daughter, and John (Hamish Linklater), a serial predator striving for redemption. Mary believes serial killer Kit Parker (Xavier Samuel), Emma’s former squeeze, is the one who took her girl, and is so desperate to find her that she strongarms John into serving as her personal private detective, driving all over Texas (and beyond) to locate Emma. Like John, Emma wants to move past her crime and punishment, though she’s by far the more sympathetic of the two; she doesn’t know about Kit’s crimes throughout their relationship, and having been exposed to the truth, she’s trying to put the pieces of her life back together.
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So there you have it: A disparate trio indirectly linked by circumstance alone, each of them burdened by their tales of woe and by interior struggles. But that’s not enough secrets, so of course there must be others. Pete Guillory (Enrique Murciano), Emma’s psychiatrist and de facto WPP handler, is hitched to a former patient, Lisa (Ashley Madekwe), and might be a stealth creepazoid, too; Rose Lord (Chiara Aurelia), a local teen living in Emma’s new home of St. James, Louisiana, is abused on the regular by her pillar-of-the-community mom, Diana (Katherine Willis); Jess (Emyri Crutchfield), another St. James kid and the first friend Emma makes, lives in a group home for unwanted youth that has a seedy background of its very own. Secrets beget secrets beget yet more secrets, and then a bunch of other secrets, apparently jealous of all the attention the first batch of secrets get, rear their heads and complicate an already knotty series.
There’s a palpable lack of audience confidence resting in the pile of hushed cries and whispers that comprise “Tell Me Your Secrets,” as if Warner and her team felt a tad concerned over whether the chief narrative is enough narrative and requires additional narrative to glue all ten episodes together. Frankly, this is a colossal writerly misstep. For one, Brenneman, Linklater, and especially Rabe, a steady, forceful performer who knows how to smoothly maneuver the gap separating Emma’s innocence from her complicity, serve as a terrific core cast, each of them working beautifully even though they share screen time either rarely (a’la John and Mary) or never (a’la Emma). They’re all searching for the same things, peace, closure, and absolution most of all, and they all go about their individual searches in markedly different ways.
John searches by keeping to himself and turning to spiritual practice. Mary searches by keeping herself public, a known champion for the rights and safety of children all over the country. Emma’s search closely follows John’s example – she’s a loner by necessity, except when she saves Jess from Rose’s bullying, then slowly befriends Rose when Jess goes missing. She might be dead. Someone might’ve murdered her. We all see the body, but we don’t see it disappear, and Emma sets out to vindicate herself – Pete thinks she’s hallucinating due to her meds, but remember that part about him being a creepazoid – by ingratiating herself to strangers. On paper this makes a rich text echoing with character parallels. In practice, the richness is cut through with a whole alphabet of side plots that only ever detract from what Warner’s trying to accomplish by connecting the dots between her leads.
All “Tell Me Your Secrets” needs is to emphasize their differences, and in so doing highlight what all they have in common. Someone like Emma can be guilty and innocent at the same time, culpable by her association with Kit but blameless due to ignorance; someone like John could walk a better path if given the right tools, but he could just as easily stray from it; someone like Mary whose life is irrevocably changed by male predation can become a predator herself. (Not that Warner meant for this to happen, but Mary actually provides an interesting foil to Carey Mulligan’s character in Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman”; where that film can’t decide if its heroine is a crusader or a criminal, “Tell Me Your Secrets” has an immediately clear perspective on Mary’s mental wellbeing as her mission slowly unravels her mind and morals.)
But the show goes on too many tangents, as if attempting to justify its own name, and none of them are as good or as resonant as the ones held onto by Emma, Mary, and John. Tut-tutting “Tell Me Your Secrets” for its fundamental darkness would be silly; it’s perfectly fine that Warner is inclined toward nihilism more so than hope. But she leans so far over in her efforts as seeing that goal through that the whole damn show falls flat on its face. When you think the show can’t go darker, it manages to find a new layer of darkness, like a black hole of bad feelings so overwhelming that even two seasons of “Game of Thrones” can’t compare. Swampy neo-noirs about child murder, by their very nature, won’t be sunny. But “Tell Me Your Secrets” doesn’t even look for a single ray. It’s an altogether inhuman experience. [C-]
