It's On Your Face

Fox's new show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth, should be fluffily entertaining and satisfying, but it pretty much isn't; it's kind of dull. However, I'm just babbling out loud and surely not the first person to snarkily observe that the show depends on the ability of its main characters to spot miniscule facial movements that are involuntary even in people who are presumably practiced liars who are prepared for the fact that they're going to lie, to the extent that the main characters can also call out when people are faking emotions they're not feeling, like sorrow or surprise. The show isn't un-nuanced about the realities of this - I saw an episode where at first they think somebody's lying, but then they realize that she's using Botox - and I presume that at some point they're going to engage with somebody who's both a practiced and a knowledgeable liar, somebody who knows the tells Tim Roth's character looks for (or is really, really innately good at it). But the show also depends on the ability of a large number of guest actors every episode to accurately sell all these emotions that they're not actually experiencing.

There's any number of directions to take that essential paradox, either to complicate or to resolve it, but in brief I think it's a nifty illustration of one of my hobbyhorses: how what's actually real and what seems to be realistic have a complicated and fractious relationship in a fictional context (if not outside of one as well).