Amazon Prime Video’s We Were Liars, adapted from E. Lockhart’s bestselling YA novel, arrives with sun and shadows. It’s a series that thrives on atmosphere—lush island settings, beautiful but broken people, and a mystery that creeps in quietly before detonating.
The story centers on Cadence Sinclair Eastman (Emily Alyn Lind), heir to a privileged, generationally wealthy New England family who spend their summers on the private Beechwood Island. Every year, Cadence returns to the island with her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and outsider Gat, the nephew of her aunt’s boyfriend. Together they are “The Liars”—bound by blood, secrets, and a youthful arrogance that masks deeper cracks.
But something terrible happened during Summer Fifteen. Cadence remembers almost nothing of it. There's only pain, confusion, and the sharp edges of a truth buried too deep. Two years later, she returns to the island to piece things together, but nothing feels right. Her cousins are acting off. The adults are whispering behind closed doors. And then there’s Harris Sinclair, the tyrannical patriarch whose grip on the family is suffocating even from behind his polite smile.
The series splits its time between Summer Seventeen and fragmented flashbacks to Summer Fifteen, slowly revealing a tragedy that reshaped the family forever. It’s a puzzle box of memories, regret, and privilege, where every new clue is another gut-punch.
One of the strengths of We Were Liars is its willingness to go darker than most YA adaptations. The show doesn’t flinch from tackling themes like generational wealth, racism, emotional manipulation, and inherited trauma. The island, once idyllic, becomes almost gothic in tone as the layers are peeled back. Especially in scenes where Cadence confronts her controlling grandfather or wanders alone in the shadowy halls of her family’s estate, haunted by things she can’t yet name.
Shubham Maheshwari is a standout as Gat, giving the show a moral center amid the Sinclair family’s moral rot. Esther McGregor as Mirren brings a quiet melancholy to the role, while Mamie Gummer, in an expanded arc as one of the Sinclair daughters, helps flesh out the adult dysfunction in a way that feels earned rather than soapy.
Where the show stumbles is in its structure. The timeline hopping can be confusing, especially early on, and a few subplots (particularly involving the adult siblings and their inheritance games) feel like padding more than essential narrative. There’s also an over-reliance on voiceover that sometimes tells instead of shows. Still, by the time the truth fully unravels in the final two episodes, the emotional blow lands hard.
We Were Liars won’t be for everyone. It asks for patience, rewards emotional investment, and isn’t afraid to get messy. But for those drawn to haunting summer stories full of fractured families and twisty revelations, it delivers. It’s a show that understands the weight of secrets and the cost of telling the truth.
Beautifully shot, occasionally uneven, and emotionally gutting, We Were Liars makes its mark. It makes a great limited series, and I don't feel a second season would live up to this one. But Amazon may decide to return to Beechwood after all.
