Lie to Me (TV series)



Dr. Cal Lightman is a Living Lie Detector, able to calculate human honesty through facial expressions - called Micro Expressions - and body language. The pioneer of this field, he operates his own business, working with federal and private clients to solve criminal and civil cases. A case of Truth in Television (well, somewhat), as the show is based on the science of Paul Ekman.

Lightman is joined by a team of three other analysts. Dr. Gillian Foster is Lightman's close friend and the other senior staff member. She usually heads up another investigation while Lightman is busy on a separate case. Ria Torres is a "natural" deception-detector. Lightman found her as a security agent at the airport. Rounding out the band is Eli Loker, an utterly shameless flirt committed to 100% honesty.

The usual format of the show follows the team around as they pursue two different cases, typically one criminal and one brought to them by a private client. Though their research into microexpressions can't be used in court as evidence, it provides a start for prosecutors and companies in ferreting out the truth.

The show stars Tim Roth as Dr. Lightman. That's right, Mr. Orange knows when you're lying.

Despite only initially being ordered for 13 episodes, it was a big hit with audiences at first, but its ratings rapidly declined, leading to its cancellation as of May 10, 2011 by Fox.

For the South Korean series of the same name, see Lie to Me SK.

Provides examples of:
"Cal: It takes two to do what? Go down the pub, get drunk every night? You come back rat-arsed, knock your wife and kid about."
 * Abusive Parents: It's been hinted at that Cal's father wasn't a nice man, but "Funhouse" confirms it:

"Zach: "Great. Voice pattern analysis. Which one of you reads palms?" Lightman: "I'll bet yours are sweaty. And hairy.""
 * Action Girl: Detective Wallowski, who's surprisingly willing to kick ass on Cal's behalf, considering he maced her for breaking into his house.
 * Amicably Divorced: Cal and Zoe.
 * Animal Motifs: Cal's metaphor for women in "Double Blind". He tells Torres to look up the monarch and the viceroy butterflies - predators won't touch either butterfly because they look so similar, but one is harmless and the other is poisonous. He later calls Naomi a "viceroy", because
 * Armor-Piercing Question: The entire team uses them, but Cal's pretty much weaponized them.
 * Backstory: Every episode seems to delve deeper into the characters' history, though notable ones are "Depraved Heart", "Secret Santa", and "Sweet Sixteen".
 * Bad Liar: Virtually everyone who goes up against the Lightman Group.
 * Clara. She's fascinated with the work that the Lightman Group does, and it's the impetus for her eventually . Unfortunately, it backfires on her when.
 * Batman Gambit / Gambit Roulette: It's a given that in any episode, Cal will be pulling at least one of these.
 * Cal, Gillian, and Burns vs. Little Moon in "Exposure" is one big one:.
 * Beta Couple Loker and Torres, to Lightman and Foster's alpha couple.
 * Bilingual Bonus: In the beginning of "Pied Piper", Wilkes is praying the Confeitor, the confession of sin from the Roman Catholic church (which is also the origin of the phrase "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa") in the original Latin. The show is also fond of only translating Spanish when it's plot-relevant, so that also probably counts.
 * Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: In "Love Always".
 * Brandishment Bluff: Torres scares the hell out of a man in the rough part of town by walking aggressively, wearing a hefty jacket, and then shoving her hand into her pocket to grab something. She talks to the man, mentions how he's scared that she has a gun (which is intentional on her part), and then stops the charade and pulls out her card.
 * Briefcase Full of Money: What Dr. Lightman purported to be trying to hide when he tested Ria Torres at the airport. After he and Dr. Foster end their hiring pitch, they leave behind the briefcase; when Ria calls them on the "forgotten" item, Lightman says nonchalantly that's her hiring bonus.
 * Bunny Ears Lawyer: Cal. He sticks his nose into his team's personal business on a regular basis without hesitation, he acts like a Jerkass to everyone (clients included), and has a fairly big ego. He's also brilliant at what he does. He never seems to miss a single flinch, even on random passerbys.
 * The impetus for a scorned girlfriend and her son to come to the Lightman Group in "Rebound".
 * Central Theme: Systematic bias, and how it can affect judgment, cropping up whenever Loker or Torres get involved in a case. Let us say they are both passionate. One episode also implies that bias caused a disaster for Lightman early in his work.
 * Another theme that's been popping up is the loyalty between partners (usually a case-of-the-week parallel to Cal and Gillian) and when deception between partners is acceptable.
 * Church of Happyology: "Scientific Repatterning" in "Beyond Belief".
 * Clear My Name: Reynolds in "Lack of Candor", Cal in "Headlock", Burns in "Exposure".
 * Wallowski in "Dirty Loyal" is a
 * Confess to a Lesser Crime: Frequently used by suspects. Justified in that the team can almost always detect if a suspect feels guilty or ashamed, but can't tell why.
 * Consulting a Convicted Killer: Cal pays visit to a serial rapist and torturer for clues about the recent string of copycat crimes.
 * Cynical Mentor: Helen doesn't quite believe Cal can read people correctly every single time. Of course, she's also, so her judgment is clouded, to say the least.
 * Danger Takes a Backseat: A fugitive takes Torres hostage this way in "Honey".
 * Dating What Daddy Hates: Pretty much any boy Emily Lightman brings home isn't going to be good enough for Cal.
 * He's warming up to Liam. Though not enough to stop calling him "Willy".
 * Dead Baby Comedy: "What's green and red and goes really fast?" "A frog in a blender." Creepy, but it says something about Cal that he knew the punchline before the killer said it.
 * About half the dialogue of the Pied Piper, really. What tips it over the edge is the creepy little-kid voice.
 * Deal with the Devil: In "Sweet Sixteen", what
 * Death by Origin Story:
 * Delaying Action:
 * This was pretty much a Heroic Sacrifice for a character we had only seen for that episode. And it was Awesome
 * Did Not Do the Research: The episode "Bullet Bump" focuses around a murder at a political rally for a Governor of Virginia running for reelection. Governors are prohibited from serving consecutive terms in Virginia.
 * In "A Perfect Score", the teacher says she can "hit any percentile" on the SAT. A percentile shows the percent of test takers (for that year or specific test round) that scored lower than you, and would be impossible to guess.
 * The Basque suicide bomber in "Love Always". Suicide bombings is probably the only one thing the ETA has not done.
 * In Season 1 Episode 9, there was . A point by point detailing what they got wrong and how wrong it was would be tiring but let us just say they got absolutely everything wrong. The most egregious example?
 * Dios Mío, ¿Qué He Hecho?: The killer in "Headlock".
 * Disabled Snarker: Sarah, the new grad student in season three, who is also deaf.
 * Enhance Button: Lampshaded. "Can you blow up her eyebrows? And do that thing."
 * The show generally doesn't use this - we don't see pixellated pictures get all cleared up... because they're already all cleared up. It seems all cameras in the show's universe have ludicrously high resolution that lets them keep detail no matter how much one zooms in...
 * Fight Clubbing: The premise of "Headlock", combined with Cal pulling a "these aren't the droids you're looking for" to everyone about.
 * Five-Man Band
 * The Hero - Dr. Cal Lightman
 * The Lancer - Dr. Gillian Foster
 * The Big Guy - Ben Reynolds
 * The Smart Guy - Eli Loker
 * The Chick - Ria Torres
 * Tagalong Kid - Emily Lightman
 * Flashed Badge Hijack: Loker pulls one in "Honey". His "badge" is just his wallet.
 * Four-Temperament Ensemble: Lightman is choleric, Foster is melancholic, Torres is sanguine and Loker is phlegmatic.
 * Friend on the Force: Detective Wallowski.
 * Frying Pan of Doom: Gillian tries whacking one of the attackers in "Delinquent" with her frying pan, but unfortunately, it doesn't do much besides get her tackled by the same guy and tied up.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: Half of Zoe and Cal's banter in "The Whole Truth", especially the scene where Cal's locked up and Zoe's deciding whether or not to bail him out.
 * In "Killer App", while talking to a geeky web designer (basically Mark Zuckerberg without the movie), we have this delightful little exchange:

"Loker: Do you expect us to just share this delusion that Lightman is infallible? Gillian: Without Lightman, you'd be in some university basement doing research, and you [Torres] would still be a glorified baggage handler. Maybe instead of polishing up your resumes, you might want to think about what you can do to help Lightman."
 * Give Geeks a Chance: Cal's ex-wife, Zoe.
 * Go Among Mad People: Twice. Once in Pied Piper, and again in Funhouse.
 * Hard Work Hardly Works: Dr. Lightman spent years studying microexpressions, while Ria Torres is a natural. In a mild variation, he's actually somewhat bothered by it. However it's also subverted, as Lightman is better at it than Torres and doesn't have emotional blindspots.
 * Also subverted in that most of Torres' mistakes come from relying on her natural gift. Lightman does seem to enjoy calling her out on this a bit too much though.
 * Truth in Television. Paul Ekman, the real life Lightman, found that about 0.25% of the population qualifies as a "truth wizard" (someone able to spot a lie at least 80% of the time).
 * Hesitation Equals Dishonesty: Deconstructs it: Prepared lies in fact generally cause people to answer quicker, not slower, because they have already prepared their story for questioning. The show goes on to explain that the way to catch these people is to ask them to repeat their story backwards, which is a definite case of Shown Their Work - your average liar won't bother to practice enough to get this right, but someone telling the truth will obviously be able to draw on their memory to answer (e.g. "I went to the park at about midnight, before that I was at the restaurant, and before that I was out giving candy to orphans.")
 * Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Loker and his various love interests, including.
 * Emily and new boyfriend Liam.
 * Hyper Awareness
 * I Did What I Had to Do: Burns's justification for.
 * I Have This Friend: Gillian uses this one when asking Reynolds why.
 * Turns out he has a very good reason -
 * Informed Attribute: Eli Loker is said to be a practitioner of "radical honesty", but apart from an occasional tactless line we don't ever see it, though supposedly it should be quite radical. In fact, a major story arc has him lying extensively and dragging Torres into his lies. He was caught lying about his feelings for a woman, and was insincere about his motives when pretending to be Emily's friend in order to keep an eye on her.
 * This may have been true in the beginning, however, one of the plot points of Season 1 was him deciding there were situations where it was okay to lie, and leaving this idea of radical honesty behind him.
 * Internal Affairs: IA plays a big part in "Dirty Loyal", where Wallowski and her partner are the target of an investigation.
 * Ironic Nursery Tune: The "Pied Piper" from the same episode sings the "Jack and Jill" rhyme, then giggles high-pitched into the phone, and says "I'm gonna get you! Ready or not, here I come!" in his phone call to his original victims. 17 years later, he calls the aunt and uncle of his original victims, and sings them "Ring Around the Rosey" with the same ending.
 * It's Personal:
 * Cal and suicides, for very good reason - . Most notably explored in "Depraved Heart". Also tends to flip his shit if a case involves teenage girls, since it hits close to his own daughter. Abusive fathers also ping Cal's radar, since his father used to get drunk and smack Cal and his mother around.
 * Gillian and adopted children -  - as well as drug addiction -
 * Torres and.
 * Kansas City Shuffle: A fairly brilliant one. In the teaser for "In the Red", Cal inexplicably has joined a bank robbery team. As we learn from the episode-long flashback, Cal actually
 * Keeping Secrets Sucks
 * Kick the Dog: The goon in "Exposure" who steals a terrified and blindfolded Gillian's money after he's made rape threats to her.
 * Last-Name Basis: Characters address each other by last name more often than first name.
 * Lie Detector: Dr. Lightman points out all the ways polygraphs suck. One of them involves getting a guy to fail the control questions by use of a woman in a sexy outfit.
 * In "Sweet Sixteen" he used a fake lie detector so the subject would focus on beating that rather than his body language.
 * In a season one episode he also taught someone how to "cheat" and make the lie detector read her as truthful, because her story was true, but the situation made her so anxious that the polygraphs would pick up lies.
 * Living Lie Detector: The entire premise of the series.
 * Loophole Abuse: See Twerp Sweating below. The daughter specifically asks Dr. Lightman not to do any "covert" lie detection. She neglected to include "overt" lie detection as well. Hence the quoted conversation below.
 * Lying to the Perp: Cal, of course. Not just the perps, but material witnesses too.
 * One notable example was Cal bringing in the "father" of a girl who had committed suicide to get a guy to confess to "depraved heart murder". It was a mate of his.
 * Overt example in "Headlock" where Cal lies to the face of a witness to a fight club.
 * Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: "Beat The Devil" has the verification of a UFO as its B-plot. Thirty-minute mark, they find (real!) video footage of it. Fifty-minute mark, an Air Force officer shows up with a bullshit story. Loker sees right through him to the truth: The Air Force has no idea what it was. In the very next sentence, Loker re-established my dormant inner-UFO-nut. The Air Force would NEVER admit that any flying object in US airspace is unidentified! They finally get the witness and the Air Force to agree on a story to save the witness' career - uber-uber-top-secret aircraft. Loker smiles and saves the video to hard drive as the episode ends.
 * May-December Romance: A villainous example - Martin Walker and Helen Dezekis.
 * Mentor Ship: Cal and Helen, at Oxford.
 * Mood Whiplash: "Tractor Man" ends with  The scene that immediately follows is Loker playing the guitar and singing a happy song to a group of children.
 * Moral Dissonance: Loker. Yay, you made it so thieves got put away. But the people they ruined stayed ruined. Nice work. * Sarcastic Clapping* He did get called out on it beforehand and was punished afterwards.
 * So instead, it's okay to lie to your client, as long as you think the outcome of lying is better than that of telling the truth? I wouldn't hire someone if I thought that they would take it on themselves to decide what truths would be told, and most professionals with ethical guidelines wouldn't allow it.
 * In the second season premiere, Cal  No other character (including the woman in question, or at least the personality that was threatened) questions what he did afterwards, despite it being ludicrously dangerous, unprofessional, and unethical.
 * And was completely necessary considering the situation they were in.
 * It nearly got him killed, too.
 * Most Important Person: Cal and Gillian, to each other. Explicitly stated in "The Whole Truth", when Cal says of Gillian (to his Romantic False Lead, Clara), "she's my Leo" - meaning, she's the person he would trust with everything, including his death.
 * My Master, Right or Wrong: Torres has this for Cal, but in "Pied Piper", Loker calls it into question. Torres accuses him of being a rat fleeing the sinking ship, but Loker (rightly) points out that Cal . Unfortunately, Gillian catches them and reams them out, proving her adherance to the trope:

"Loker: Why? Three guesses - Foster, Foster, and oh yeah, Foster."
 * Averted hard by Loker, towards both Cal and Gillian. He makes it known from the beginning that he questions their methods, and as time goes on and he constantly takes shit from them, he believes Cal's outright dangerous and Gillian's a better liar than any of them. He very much disapproves of Ria's hero-worship and emulation of Cal.
 * No Endor Holocaust: It appears the entire lead cast have an immunity to PTSD. In one episode Cal gets waterboarded (which involves being drowned to death and revived repeatedly). That's the kind trauma that no one gets over.
 * One of the girl victims seen earlier in the episode seemed horribly traumatized, but not Lightman. Not only this, but no one else seems to care either. Not even Gillian, which just screams shoddy writing, as she cares about him more than anyone, or his ex-wife, or even Ria, who was threatened by the psychopath-waterboarder. No episode after this mentions it (in fact, it's not even mentioned again in the same episode in which it occurs), and his personality is completely unchanged. The waterboarding may as well have never actually happened, which blows believability totally out of the water.
 * Noodle Incident: The show seems to take great pleasure in mentioning them by the dozens, with everything from Lightman apparently having once tricked his way through White House security to Loker's MIT Mathlete's initiation rite, which apparently included a quart of macaroni salad (making it a LITERAL Noodle Incident).
 * Whatever Cal did involving a casino owner's wife to get him banned from Vegas.
 * If we believe him, Cal once mooned the Queen of England.
 * Not So Different: In "The Royal We", Cal tells how to create a disturbed personality ("constant criticism and lack of affection"), talking about a pageant contestant. Torres points out, "you mean, the way you treat Loker". She's right - Cal's jerkass tendencies toward his employees (Loker in particular) have edged into downright cruelty.
 * "Funhouse" explores how Cal's mother, Cal, and Emily (who have depression and other mental illness in the family) aren't so different from Wayne's father, Wayne, and Amanda (who have paranoid schizophrenia that runs in the family).
 * Not That Kind of Doctor: Gillian in "Exposed". Cal in "Smoked" and "Saved".
 * Out of Order: Fox is airing the entire second season in completely random order.
 * AGAIN.
 * [Overprotective Dad]/[Papa Wolf]
 * Perp Sweating: Along with material witnesses and victims. Cal and Ria's techniques of information gathering waltz into the distinctly unusual.
 * Ria:
 * Flirted with a considerable number of men at a frat party to see if any of them are aroused by voyeurism.
 * Took her head covering off inside a mosque to gauge anti-American fundamentalism.
 * Faked hysterical tears to get the head of a juvie facility to allow the Lightman Group jurisdiction on a murder investigation.
 * Cal:
 * Showed a suspected statutory rapist pictures of young semi-naked women to see if he's a hebephile.
 * Pretended to have an imaginary friend to determine if a boy can tell reality from fiction.
 * Faked (or staged) a fight with his daughter on his cell phone in order to see if the parents he was interviewing were abusive.
 * Threatened a girl  with rape to get   to talk.
 * Fired a loaded (with blanks) gun inside a locked room in the proximity of the South Korean ambassador.
 * Made out with a murder suspect to gauge the victim's son's reaction to her promiscuity (and determine if he slept with her).
 * Cal Lampshades his unusual methods in "Pied Piper": "Sometimes you have to use a pickaxe to get at the truth". Of course, this is right after he's insulted the aunt and uncle of a murder victim and trashed their bookcase because he thinks they've faked the tape of the killer. They haven't.
 * Allowed a suspected molester, his possible victim, and her mother to be in the same place at the same time, and told the mother the daughter is a sadist. He then invites them to "enjoy the freakshow" and leaves.
 * Gillian gets in on the action only a little, notably the time she and Cal staged a fight in front of a woman they suspected of being a victim of domestic abuse. Gillian slaps Cal, but the woman isn't being abused.
 * Also, the time she pulled out the cleavage and short skirt to bait a witness out of a dive bar.
 * Platonic Prostitution: The pilot.
 * Plot Parallel: Usually the case of the week has parallels to one or more of the team members and their personal lives.
 * The Power of Friendship: The whole point of episode 5 in season 2, subverted through the whole episode until the end.
 * Rape as Drama: In "Blinded", the criminal blinds and then rapes women.
 * "Moral Waiver", which is about rape in an army platoon.
 * Rapid-Fire Typing: Oi Loker! Pull up that picture you showed me that other day!
 * Sassy Black Woman: Zoe and Emily may be considered as such, given that Zoe is half-black.
 * Shout-Out: "Because you always have been, and you always will be... my best mate!"
 * Cal in the mental institution in "Pied Piper" is one big valentine to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, especially his very McMurphy-esque canary-eating grin as he gets admitted.
 * "Funhouse", though, takes the expectation of the "Cuckoo's Nest" parallels and then brutally subverts them.
 * Cal calls Burns "Captain America" a few times in "Exposure".
 * Romantic False Lead:
 * Cal seems to have a thing for hot blondes with whom he's in over his head. First Poppy, the Vegas card shark (or, as Gillian calls her, "roulette"); then Clara, the former gold-digging businesswoman who, as of "Teacher and Pupils" . She lasts until "Bullet Bump",  . Then there's Naomi, from "Double Blind", who actually successfully cons him. Now it looks like Wallowski's going this way, too, though she isn't a blonde.
 * David Burns is Gillian's Romantic False Lead from "Delinquent" to "Exposure". He seems perfect for her, a gentleman who works with kids and treats her like a princess. Unfortunately, he's.
 * Shown Their Work: The show is based off of Paul Ekman's promising, but not-yet-complete, research. It doesn't acknowledge many of the shortcomings in the research (unlike Ekman himself), and doesn't have time to explain the intricacies of the findings, but the principles are quite sound. Anyone familiar with Paul Ekman's research will recognize things in this show, lifted directly from the man's lectures and experiments.
 * The pilot, for example, used a clip of a microexpression on Kato Kaelin from the OJ Simpson trial; the exact same clip that Ekman has used in his own lectures.
 * Also, pictures of Tim Roth going through the Facial Action Coding System are mounted in Lightman's office.
 * However, the show leaves fidelity to the real Paul Ekman behind somewhere late in the first season, and only deviates further as episodes wear on.
 * Split Personality: from episode 1 of the second season. Typical fictional example of MPD/DID where.
 * Stalking Is Love: Cal has been keeping Burns under surveillance, mainly because he's Gillian's boyfriend and Cal doesn't trust anyone around Gillian. Torres is surprised; Loker isn't:

"Dr. Lightman: Hi, Dan! Boy: Hi, Mr. Lightman! Dr. Lightman: Are you going to try to have sex with my daughter tonight?"
 * Stuff Blowing Up: In "Sweet Sixteen", not only is.
 * Thicker Than Water: Do not threaten Emily Lightman. Not only will you have Cal to deal with, but
 * The Troubles: Cal worked with British intelligence in Belfast in 1986. He failed to recognise the facial expressions of a man who then killed six people in a pub.
 * Cal's experience with Irish terrorists is expanded upon in "Sweet Sixteen": In 2003, Cal was in Boston, hunting down IRA members and trying to broker a peace between the IRA and British intelligence. One of the IRA terrorists,
 * Too Dumb to Live: The conflict of the episode "The Best Policy" is kicked off by a young American man who brings his sister marijuana in a country where possession is an executable offense, and the Lightman Group must assist in negotiating their release. Drug use issues aside, trying to bring narcotics across national borders and through customs checkpoints is risky at the best of times, but one would think that someone even considering it would at least want to ensure that the country they are bringing it into does not have the death penalty for possession. Flashing the bag of weed on the open road in front of government vehicles does not help either.
 * Twerp Sweating: Dr. Lightman's daughter gets him to promise not to do any "covert science things", but...


 * Inverted massively in a Crowning Moment of Funny during "Killer App." Cal comes home to the sound of Emily making some suggestive noises, only to find her and Liam fully clothed and merely stretching after a jog. Then, with Dad standing right there and her boyfriend stretching her hamstring, Emily proceeds do her best impression of the infamous restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally.
 * Two Lines, No Waiting: Usually there are two cases per episode, with Cal and Ria on one, Gillian and Eli on the other. This has been switched up in Season Two with Cal and Gillian on one case and Eli and Ria on the other. One episode of Season Three had Cal and Eli on one case, and Gillian and Ria on the other, with decidedly epic results.
 * The War on Terror: In the first season finale, two American-born suicide bombers attack Washington DC.
 * A second season episode, "Secret Santa", takes place in Afghanistan.
 * Turns out Cal isn't the only intelligence expert hanging around.
 * "React to Contact" deals with PTSD and cover-ups among Iraq War soldiers.
 * What Happened to the Mouse?
 * From season one's finale:
 * From season two's finale: Hopefully, this doesn't become a habit.
 * As of "The Canary's Song" we now know that
 * Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Or, in Reynolds' case - why did it have to be rats?
 * Will They Or Won't They: Cal and Gillian; expect a couple of seasons' worth of UST, especially now that.
 * And that.
 * "Fold Equity" suggests that Eli and Ria may experience this as well.
 * "Darkness and Light" guarantees it.
 * Working with the Ex: Cal has to work with ex-wife Zoe on several occasions, and ends up in bed with her a couple of times.
 * Wouldn't Hit a Girl: In "Exposure", Little Moon and his gang torture Burns and are willing to rough up Cal, but other than brandishing guns at her and utilizing the Standard Female Grab Area, don't touch Gillian.
 * Cal subverts it in "Black and White" by macing a female police officer. In his defense, it was late at night, she and her partner had broken into Cal's home, and he blind-fired it around a corner when he heard footsteps.
 * Xanatos Speed Chess: Cal's manipulation of Terry Marsh, pretending to be blackmailed into working with Marsh and the gangsters he was involved with while really working for the FBI and using Marsh as a pawn the entire time.
 * Cal versus Martin Walker in "Beat the Devil", to the point where they even draw comparisons between their conflict and a game of chess.
 * You Can Always Tell a Liar: The entire point of this series.
 * Which, interestingly enough, it subverts in "Dirty Loyal", when