Fox Home Entertainment
MSRP: $59.99
Stars: Tim Roth, Kelli Williams, Brendan Hines, Monica Raymund
Release date: August 25, 2009
Based on the work of Dr. Paul Ekman, FOX’s new crime drama Lie to Me stars Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman, a renowned expert on lying with a tarnished reputation. Founder of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Deception Detection Unit, Lightman now heads a private firm in Washington D.C., offering his services to high-profile clients, local and federal law enforcement.
The main supporting characters are Lightman’s partner, Dr. Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams), who often plays “good cop” to his “bad cop”, and two junior associates: Eli Loker (Brendan Hines), who’s committed himself to never telling a lie, and the newly-hired Ria Torres (Monica Raymund), one of an extremely small percentage of the population who can spot deceptive body language with no prior training.
You might think the ability to tell when someone is lying would take the mystery out of a whodunit show, but quite realistically, Lightman and his team can only predict when, not what is being lied about or why someone is lying. Just like any investigators, they have to dig for those deeper answers before cracking a case. Lightman often feigns a wide range of emotions and reactions to gauge how others react, and Roth’s acting is up to the task.
In the second half of the season, Jennifer Beals appears as Lightman’s ex-wife, Assistant U.S. Attorney Zoe Landau and Mekhi Phifer appears as FBI Special Agent Ben Reynolds. Both characters are good foils for Lightman, and I’m curious to see where the writers go in Season 2.
The three-disc Blu-ray set includes all thirteen episodes, deleted scenes, and a making-of featurette, “The Truth about Lie to Me“.
–Gerald So
