Amazon Prime Video's new series Tell Me Your Secrets was filmed all the way back in 2018, but at the time it was intended for cable channel TNT. After the entire 10-episode season was completed, however, TNT decided against broadcasting it, and it looked like the show might not see the light of day. That is, until Amazon stepped in. But despite Tell Me Your Secrets' new lease on life, it turns out TNT might have had the right idea when it shelved the show. While the series was created by Call the Midwife writer Harriet Warner, it's more apt to compare it to executive producer Bruna Papandrea's HBO dramas, Big Little Lies and The Undoing; dark, female-driven, morally complex thrillers whose popularity hinged on the tantalizing revelations they promised. Tell Me Your Secrets aims to capture that same magic, but it incorporates so many mysteries, includes so many so-called "complicated" characters and requires so many leaps of logic that any tension it achieves is undercut by its sprawling mess of too-muchness.
The series revolves around three characters: Lily Rabe's Karen Miller is the girlfriend of convicted serial killer Kit Parker (Xavier Samuel), and is starting a new life in witness protection as Emma Hall; Hamish Linklater's John Tyler is a rapist who was recently released from prison and is trying to keep his demons at bay; and Amy Brenneman's Mary Barlow is a desperate mother still trying to find her adult daughter, Theresa, who disappeared years ago. Of course, all of these people end up having a connection to one another. Mary has a photo that places her daughter and Kit in the same place at the same time, and although there's no other evidence to suggest Theresa was one of his victims, she's convinced Kit killed her. So when Kit commits suicide in prison, Mary decides Karen must have the answers she's seeking, leading her to hire John to uncover Karen's new identity and location.
The rub is that while Mary believes Karen is simply refusing to confess what really happened to her daughter, Karen is actually suffering from memory loss and can't recall parts of her past with Kit. While this is a major plot point in the series, the story complicates it by using flashbacks that appear to provide more information than Karen/Emma should have. As a result, it's unclear if these segments are insight provided solely for the viewer or if Emma is aware of it too and simply lying when she says she doesn't remember.
Despite this confusion, the show mostly seems to be on Emma's side. Circumstances have painted Karen as a villain, but as Emma, she's consistently the most palatable character in the story -- even if she's also the most tiresome. Lily Rabe is an excellent actress, as her work in American Horror Story and The Undoing has shown; however, here she's mostly limited to playing various degrees of overwrought trauma and fear, which grows exhausting after 10 episodes. Still, it's clear Karen isn't the monster the public sees her as.
Instead, it's the other characters who the story is constantly raising suspicions about, including Karen/Emma's supposedly well-meaning psychiatrist, Peter Guillory (Enrique Murciano). On the surface, these characters may approximate the many other morally compromised antiheroes that populate peak TV, but in this case, they aren't so much psychologically complex as just bad people who like to masquerade under the veneer of respectability they've cultivated (or are trying to cultivate). This is especially true for Mary, who's created a charitable foundation to find missing people, but has become so consumed with the need to find her daughter she no longer seems to know the difference between right and wrong.
Meanwhile, although the mystery of what happened to Mary's daughter makes up the backbone of the show, there's also a confused jumble of additional mysteries and left-field revelations that come up throughout the series to the point where it becomes hard to care about any of it. There are subplots about orphans disappearing and teen girls who are inexplicably drawn to Emma, a revelation midway through about a young daughter who was hidden away and the discovery of a necklace found with human remains that the characters take as proof of a crime despite a lack of DNA evidence -- and that's just for starters.
Yes, as the title suggests, all the characters (including secondary and tertiary characters) have shocking secrets, and then there's Emma who's a secret to herself. Her struggle with knowing what really happened in her past as Karen is what links her to the other main characters, but the show gives her so many additional mysteries to focus on and fret over, that plotlines get lost for whole episodes at a time, and with them, goes any possibility of intrigue. In the place of narrative momentum, we get Mary having a one-sided argument with a statue of the Virgin Mary where she excuses her actions by pointing out that a miracle brought the Virgin's kid back, but she isn't so lucky.
Tell Me Your Secrets wraps up most of its mysteries in one way or another by the end of its feverish final episode, while dutifully leaving the door open for a second season. Given how unsatisfying the first season is, though, I'd be perfectly happy if this series kept any further secrets to itself.
Tell Me Your Secret, starring Lily Rabe, Amy Brenneman, Hamish Linklater and Enrique Murciano, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.