Warning: This post contains major spoilers for We Were Liars.
If you’ve ever scrolled through BookTok, you may have been served a video—or, perhaps several—about E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars. Although the young-adult novel was a best-seller when it was published in 2014, it had a significant resurgence in popularity when BookTok began to really gain traction during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The corresponding hashtag for the title has since racked up over 21,000 posts.
Now, an eight-episode TV adaptation of the novel from showrunners Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) and Carina Adly Mackenzie (Roswell, New Mexico) has arrived on Prime Video just in time for the summer binge-watching season. Part teen romance, part family drama, part psychological thriller, We Were Liars centers on Cadence Sinclair Eastman (played by Emily Alyn Lind), the eldest grandchild of Harris Sinclair (David Morse), the uber wealthy patriarch of the illustrious Sinclair family. The Sinclairs are practically American royalty and spend their summers vacationing on the fictional New England private island of Beechwood, just off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Harris and his wife, Tipper (Wendy Crewson), have three grown daughters, Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Cadence’s mother Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald), and Bess (Candice King), who all bring their own children to Beechwood each year. So, during the summer months, Cadence spends the majority of her time with the three other so-called Liars, the family’s nickname for the group of four older kids who are all around the same age. In addition to Cadence, there’s Carrie’s son Johnny (Joseph Zada), Bess’ daughter Mirren (Esther McGregor), and Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), the nephew of Carrie’s longtime boyfriend Ed (Rahul Kohli). The Liars have grown up together, with Gat joining the annual pilgrimage to Beechwood for the first time the summer Cadence was 8 years old—or, as she refers to it, Summer 8.
Cadence has always viewed her idyllic…
