Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Excellent adaptation.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

First episode was great, who's the liar? Then predictably it would never have been commissioned where she was lying, so inevitably he was the bad guy. The rest of the episodes then disappointed with completely implausible twists; he raped the PC investigating in her sleep, he then was clever enough to leave no trace, yet he recorded all the footage of the attacks and left them on unencrypted phones and SD cards! I was quite glad this one ended, I don't know if another series is in the pipeline but if it is I shall give it a miss.

I'm into episode five and I've run out of gas.Quite interesting at first but the whole venture has deteriorated into a series of contrived scenes, and with that any believability has gone out with the tide at the seaside town where it's set.Froggat showed so much potential at the outset but her performance follows the script into the dustbin as the writers struggle to find their way.Why do we have to have a lesbian police officer, why do we have to have a mixed race couple? It adds nothing whatsoever to the script. It's because this is a bandwagon, politically correct type of project, that's why .Let's take some hot issues and fold them into a far fetched story, where all of the cultural anomalies of the day get their moment in the sun. Oh! and while we're sitting around the the writing table why don't we emasculate the good guys ( let's make one a house husband) and villainise most of the other male parts. That should cover all the bases!Some of the coincidences that they set up just have you groaning with the triteness of it all, and some of the characters that they bring in only make that groaning louder.In a completely pointless diversion, the characters that they introduced up in Scotland (with Edinburgh Castle in the background just to make sure you know where we are) had me longing to vote for separation again.My message to the writers and Director.... forget about season two and go sign on at the labour exchange!Having said that, it's not a complete failure, the acting's mostly good and the cinematography is fine. You can get quite a bit of entertainment value out of digging in if you suspend your standards for a week or two.To sum it up I would say that it's a thinly disguised man-hating project and I don't think we need any more fuel on that particular fire.Maybe the remaining episode can pull it out of the tailspin but I don't hold out much hopeUPDATE- episode 6 It gets cringingly worse in the final episode, many people have written about how they wrapped it all up quickly, but they didn't mention that it was like the chippie wrapping up your fish and chips. They ought to have been ashamed of themselves for putting out such garbage after leading people on for 5 episodes. One of the final scenes was an aerial view of a kayak in the marshes. It was probably one of the crew trying to get out of town just slightly ahead of a lynching party. Absolutely abysmal!

It is a perplexing world in which we live. On one hand we are urged to believe that "freedom of speech" is the very foundation of human rights and something we should all be prepared to die for ("I am Charlie", anyone?). On the other, the practical reality is that every day the world becomes more like Stalinist Russia, where anyone who dares utter anything that does not conform to the political mores of the day is mysteriously "disappeared" in the night to a Siberian Gulag. It is getting to the point that you have to check your phone when you wake up every day to make sure it is still safe to say "good morning", lest it could be deemed to be offensive by someone. This may or may not be a good thing and/or an advance in civilisation, only time will tell. But in the meantime, it renders programs such as Liar dead in the water before they start. No one would bat an eyelid if Liar featured a woman murdering someone, with or without her lying about it. And no one would care if it showed a woman lying about practically anything else, for instance lying about having an affair, as the protagonist's sister does in Liar. But for Liar, or ANY program, to suggest a woman would lie about rape would reward its makers with a metaphorical all-expenses-paid excursion to the afore mentioned Gulag, followed by a shallow grave hewn into frozen tundra with an axe. Therefore we know before the opening credits roll that the man MUST be at fault and so with its forgone conclusion Liar can never be a "thriller" or a "mystery" or a "whodunit". We have to ask ourselves, what is the point? It is a bit like someone telling you the score in the big game and then sitting down to watch it - once you know the ending you don't really care who scored what, when and how, it is all a bit of a yawn. It is good to see that the program was made with the assistance of various rape related agencies. What a pity the same courtesy was not extended to the Police, who must be hopping mad that Liar makes them look like a bunch of bigoted, incompetent and corrupt thugs. We can only hope that if the producers intended the rape related aspects to look as genuine as possible, the police side of it was intended to be as fake as possible, for if police really act in the way Liar portrays them the world is in big trouble.There are many things that do not make sense in Liar. In most series this would not be a major issue because their object is purely entertainment and we may be inclined to overlook plot flaws that allow the program to be more entertaining. But if Liar's raison d'etre is indeed entertainment then its choice of subject material and its treatment of it immediately also makes it at least partly propaganda supporting a particular world viewpoint. As such it has a responsibility to portray events credibly and accurately and in this it fails. It does not make sense that Laura gets a taxi to the restaurant but walks home. It does not make sense that she simply does not use her own phone to call a taxi rather than let Andrew inside. It does not make sense that the taxi to take her to the restaurant is there immediately, at her insistent request, while Andrew's taxi takes half an hour on a school night. It is not credible that the man would put 2 glasses in someone else's dish washer. It does not make sense that if the drug is undetectable he should need to change glasses at all. It is not credible that after ransacking the house the police left 2 dirty glasses sitting on the coffee table when they should have been used as evidence. It is not credible that the man who is so aghast when he finds out the truth about Denis, has within 30 minutes changed, Jekyll and Hyde like, into a psychopathic serial sex maniac. It is not credible that Laura is so stupid as to make accusations on social media or to break into Andrew's home. It is not credible that if Andrew is so overtly predatory he would be a highly respected Doctor loved and respected over a period of years by everyone in his workplace including Laura's sister. It is not only not credible but just plain laughable that he would ask the policewoman out for a drink, and it is not credible that she would go to his house in the first place. And it is just plain imbecilic of him to not only rape the policewoman but leave his "calling card" of dishes in the dish washer. Although, come to think of it, after carefully setting that little scene up, it is not actually referred to as evidence, so what was the point? The same could be said of Andrew's son getting a schoolgirl pregnant, something so substantial that surely it should have been a subplot but which just disappeared. What was that all about? And how about the most inept police sting in the history of policing in the final episode? I mean, really?It is a shame that at least one episode was not spent getting to know Laura and Andrew before things took a turn for the worse. Even by Episode 6 they are both strangers to us, and of no particular charm. It is always preferable that audiences find protagonists sympathetic but Laura as written and as portrayed is not. Unlike her sister and the policewoman, both of whom have equally heavy crosses to bear, she has no warmth and elicits no compassion. Overall the series is a bit like reading a newspaper report of something that happened to someone you don't know - while you may empathise at a theoretical level it doesn't really touch you at a personal or emotional level. Superficially Liar is as formulaic as any other "thriller", the bad guy gets his comeuppance, good triumphs over evil, and all is morally as it should be. However this predictable outcome rather glosses over the fact that for the entire 6 episodes a man is relentlessly harassed by a person who with no evidence simply "feels" that something has happened, and furthermore she does so with the full support of the Police. The fact that the audience may know he IS guilty is neither here nor there, the point is the series actually encourages vigilante-ism, law breaking and defamation (on Laura's part) and bigotry and stupidity (on the policewoman's part) based on a "feeling". The very pinnacles of civilization, in fact the very things that actually define it, are the systems of governance, justice, law and order and human rights, things that have taken thousands of years to achieve at a cost of the lives and deaths of probably millions of people. In less than 20 years these monumental achievements have been almost totally undone by social media/the internet, allowing the former foundations of society to be totally bypassed and replaced by mob hysteria by the masses on an hourly, even minutely basis. Whatever the producer's intention, personally I do not find programs such as Liar, that endorse such lynch mob mentality, helpful.

When I grade this 1 (awful) it is not the quality but the message I object to. In terms of sheer cinematography like directing, acting etc. this show is actually fine, but then all that professionalism is invested in a story and plot that is unbelievably biased, manipulative, political and downright hateful. The makers first introduce the accuser a very prominently neurotic woman, who only does and say irrational and annoying things and the accused, a well balanced, gentleman a great doctor and father, a rational, friendly, modest character. And just when the man is cleared of charges, something almost any viewer would be cheering for by then, things take a sudden 180 turn, but it's not the circumstances that change but in a rather unnatural, unrealistic way the characters do. The neurotic woman suddenly becomes an empathetic, courageous warrior of justice and and the gentleman doctor a wolf in sheep's clothing, a psychopathic predator enjoying his sick game with a wide sadistic grin on his face. If were to grade this show for how good an attempt it is at misandrist hate mongering and brainwashing I would give it a 10 Seriously I think third-wave feminism now has its own Jud Süss.