This Tell Me Lies finale recap contains some spoilers.
I may have been new to Tell Me Lies this year, but trust when I say I am true to this show. What began with a background show that my girlfriend and I nicknamed my “soap opera”, playing on my laptop while I meal prepped, turned into one of my favorite watches ever. I missed the boat in 2022 when it debuted, and admittedly, really did not hear a word about it until a few weeks ago. When I eventually did dive in, I had no idea there’d be a queer storyline.
The show follows a group of friends at the fictional Baird College in what I assume is an upstate New York similar to an Ithaca or Cornell. At the center of this friend group is Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and her two friends across the hall, Pippa and Bree. The show jumps between their college years (2007 through 2009) and a wedding weekend six years later in 2015. They all have their respective junior year boyfriends — as many of us did freshman year — and across the three season series, they all take turns betraying one another, telling each other secrets, exposing them when it served them best, and ultimately trying to survive the wrath of Stephen (Jackson White), Lucy’s on-and-off-again boyfriend.
Somewhere in the mess of it all, and what is such typical cis-het bullshit, a queer storyline emerges from Pippa, who’s played by non-binary and queer actor Sonia Mena. This character’s queerness is first explored in season one when she hooks up with Lucy’s roommate Charlie (Zoe Renee), who disappears from the show after the season concludes. While I understand the character served her purpose in being a safe but no-bullshit out lesbian, I would have loved to see more of her on-screen.
It was unclear how much more of Pippa’s queerness would be explored because of her long-running relationship with her own upperclassman, Wrigley (Spencer House). But as many of us know, never let your college boyfriend stop you from meeting your wife.
It’s not until season two, towards the very end, that we see Pippa’s queerness evolve. All the markings of a queer self-discovery unfold in a familiar way: an unlikely friendship with someone whose opinion somehow matters more than anyone else’s, despite really not knowing them all that well or long; not being able to get this person out of your head, and feeling guilty or even secretive of this new friendship. This isn’t like my other girl friends.
Things for Pippa are further complicated by the fact that the person she’s fallen for is Diana (Alicia Crowder), Stephen’s ex-girlfriend, her best friend’s quasi-enemy.
At the start of season three, when the students return to campus from winter break, it’s clear that Pippa has not been able to shake this crush. Tensions are high between the two: Pippa, desperate for Diana’s approval; Diana, not quite sure why Pippa cares so much what she thinks. Diana is an especially judgmental person — she can’t help it. She has her shit together. She’s months away from Yale Law, there isn’t a wrinkle in any of her pleated skirts, and she’s managed to accomplish the one thing no one else can: she survived Stephen.
But why does Pippa insist on mining for Diana’s approval? The same reason any of us put on a certain outfit or picked up a hobby. She has a big, fat, lesbian crush on her.
Pippa’s desperate need for Diana’s approval and Diana’s subsequent speculation of Pippa’s behavior erupts into both my favorite and least favorite moment of any queer coming-of-age friendship story: the big fight where you either get what you want or you experience your first real heartbreak.
Luckily for them, Pippa and Diana both got what they wanted. Maybe not immediately, but somewhere along the way.
In 2015, it’s no longer a secret that Pippa is queer and dating women. It’s referenced out in the open but, until a few episodes in, the friend group doesn’t know who she’s dating. Private conversations between Pippa and Diana allude to the fact that Diana is not quite ready to be seen in public with Pippa. It’s unclear if that’s because of her traumatic relationship with Stephen and how precious she felt about her distance from him and that friend group or if it’s because, perhaps, she wasn’t out of the closet yet. I think it’s a mixture of both.
Pippa and Diana arrive at the rehearsal dinner together for the first time. They kiss in front of everyone and enter the venue holding hands. They stand proud in their relationship and therefore their queerness. Of course things are awkward, given the dramatic history of the group, but they remain at each other’s side.
In the finale of Tell Me Lies, every little secret, every nasty betrayal is spit out on the dance floor, literally. People’s lives — or at least this moment in them — are ruined by a narcissistic sociopath with a microphone. An hours-old marriage is likely set to be annulled by morning, friendships are ruined and presumably irreparable, trauma that was otherwise healed has been ripped back open. And yet in the chaos of what is ultimately a decade of straight people nonsense, the only two to walk away completely unscathed, hand-in-hand back to their tastefully decorated apartment, are the lesbians.
It’s also worth noting that Pippa and Diana are queer women of color, and there’s something that feels intentional about that. In a show that is ultimately about the destruction that one entitled white man leaves in his wake, the queer women of color are the ones who are not just surviving but thriving, unbothered, and walking out the door together and away from their past.
