At the beginning of this past summer, I decided to binge watch a show called, Lie to Me, which is essentially about a deception expert, Dr. Cal Lightman, and his organization aimed at exposing liars by looking at facial expressions, “micro-expressions” and body language.

I found this show, again from the actress, Tricia Helfer, who guest starred in an episode from the show’s third season. If I haven’t made it obvious before, I’m a huge fan and I’m that fan that goes through actors’ entire IMDB page to see what they’ve been in and that ultimately is how I discover (older) TV shows.

But after I watched that one episode, I was intrigued and came back to the show a few months later to binge watch the entire series. And honestly, I really loved it. It only got more interesting when I found out the science of micro-expressions are real, and Dr. Lightman is based on someone real as well: a clinical psychologist, Paul Ekman, who really is an expert at deception.

erika christensen in lie to me

It’s fascinating that there’s so much someone could be telling you, just by looking at their face. In the show, Dr. Lightman has clients that range from the FBI to average everyday people who just need to know whether someone is lying or not. And I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things from this show, which is just a nice touch. I think my favorite episode out of the entire series would probably have to be an episode titled, “The Core of It”, the first episode of the second season. Erika Christensen from Parenthood (which is also a really great show to check out by the way) guest stars as someone with a dissociative identity disorder.

However, one of her personalities, Trisha, comes to Dr. Lightman saying that she saw someone get murdered, but she can’t quite remember it all so Lightman and Dr. Gillian Foster, a psychologist that works with him, try to help her figure it out. It’s interesting because it’s not like other shows or films that look down on mental illnesses like multiple personalities disorder (but that, fortunately, has been slowly changing in the last couple of years). Instead, Gillian works within the disorder and uses hypnosis to get the information out of Sophie (which is her actual name) and her other personalities who each have small parts of the memory. They don’t call her crazy or dismiss her case entirely because Cal can tell that she’s telling the truth, even though she’s only saying some of what happened.

That episode is just one out of many interesting stories that come from this show, all of which revolve around solving some type of mystery and people constantly lying to Lightman group and thinking that they can get away with fooling the world’s best deception experts. The show is interesting with the mysterious aspect of figuring out who’s lying and who isn’t, as well as the educational part of discovering how someone’s face can deceive others.

Have you ever watched the show, Lie to Me? If you haven’t, is it something you’d be interested in watching? Let me know in the comments or tweet me @mzsnguyenthai.