Liar’s return was a total waste of time
REVIEW Liar ITV ✩✩✩✩✩
This second run managed the unique trick of being both preposterous and dull
THE first series of Liar was a lurid but mechanically effective rape-revenge tale ending on a cliffhanger, as serial rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd, the best thing in it) was bumped off for his crimes. Who killed him? Who cares? This was never a mystery that needed resolving and a second run always felt surplus to requirements. Plenty of fans of the first series agreed, with almost half choosing not to return for the opener of the second and learn whether Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt) had indeed murdered her attacker. Good call.
This second run managed the unique trick of being both preposterous and dull. Were these really the same Williams brothers behind the two-series brilliance of The Missing? Here, the box of tricks had been emptied long before last night’s conclusion, with relentless flashbacks concealing the absence of a decent story and pile-ups of coincidences jostling for space alongside the sort of inexplicable behaviour only seen on TV whodunits. The final episode saw a front-door key concealed beneath a garden gnome, an experienced if serially unprofessional detective inspector casually denying legal representation to a suspect, and someone saying, ‘You know what? I think he’s lying.’ Liar was all tell, no show, and that’s the truth.
The destination was hardly worth the journey, however picturesque the sunny/ fogbound (delete as plot required) stretch of Kent coastline. As the unwieldy blackmail plot cooked up by Oliver Graham (Sam Spruell) crumbled around his ears, Laura reconciled with her sister (Zoe Tapper) and Katherine Kelly’s flinty DI found her conscience, dropping her investigation after establishing Laura had done the murderous deed after all.
The flashbacks confirming the same were unpleasant and overextended. I groaned and I shrugged but the only moment in the whole hour when I gasped was when Andrew’s traumatised son chucked his dad’s first edition of Catch-22 on a fire. Sacrilege.
‘Sometimes it’s OK to not know everything,’ reckoned Laura’s on-off love interest, Ian. Something to bear in mind next time someone considers making a second series of a show that really, really doesn’t need one.