You don’t root for him as much as tolerate him.Ĭornell, on the other hand, is actively hateable. His bland insistence that everything will turn out all right because he knows the truth belies the premise of the show entirely. Ben is just a simple sad-sack who doesn’t seem to register much emotion. Which characters will you hate? It’s a toss-up between the two main characters, Ben and detective Cornell. As is Jess, the mother of the dead child, who is all raw nerves and tears. Which characters will you love? For some reason, Ben’s wife Cristy is strangely appealing. It’s not even bad enough to be interesting, it’s just sort of blandly awful, lumbering toward some sort of conclusion that no one really cares about. The title of the show promises us sordid details but instead it delivers pat answers that anyone can find in a pulp novel. But it doesn’t impress on a plot level, either. Secrets and Lies doesn’t need to be some deep exegesis about human frailty or the way we live now. There is something going on with his estranged brother the autistic boy who lives in the neighborhood and Ben’s neighbour who hates him. Ben and his wife Cristy (KaDee Strickland) argue all the time. Otherwise this is just typical movie-of-the-week melodrama. The only thing about Secrets and Lies that resembles the Emmy-bait it is aping is the movie-calibre stars (faded though they may be), and that there are only 10 episodes in a closed story. Secrets and Lies is by far the worst of the bunch. Fox doesn’t enter the race until 14 May when it kicks off the M Night Shamalan series Wayward Pines (Juliette Lewis is in that one, too). NBC was first with The Slap CBS is debuting Battle Creek (from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan) on the same night as Secrets and Lies. Is this show any good? Right now it seems like all the networks are trying to get into the prestige television game, taking a page from True Detective, Fargo and other one-and-done-type shows and adapting them to their more broad sensibility. What is it? I can’t tell you, but you will have guessed it about halfway through the episode. Then, at the end of the first hour, we find out our first big secret. Ben tries to console the boy’s mother Jess (Natalie Martinez), but she wants nothing to do with him. Cornell pesters Ben to give a DNA sample and he says no, but after the press hounds him about it, he relents. Ben finds the body and quickly becomes a suspect after detective Cornell finds out that his daughter Abby (Belle Shouse) babysat for the dead child and had a key to the house. What happens in the premiere? Not much, sadly. Barbie Kligman, a veteran of Private Practice and CSI: NY, adapted it for American audiences. What is the show’s pedigree? Much like NBC’s The Slap, this is based on an Australian mini-series of the same name. When detective Andrea Cornell (Juliette Lewis) is assigned the case, he becomes the main suspect and, of course, his nice suburban life starts to unravel. What is this show? Ben Crawford (Ryan Phillippe) finds the body of a six-year-old neighbour when out for a morning jog. Some define “fearless actor” as Tom Cruise hanging off the Burj Khalifa, but that honor should go to Phillippe for being one of the few straight male actors who doesn’t flee from homosexual characters like they carry Gypsy curses.Wait, isn’t Secrets and Lies a Woody Allen movie? No, you’re thinking of the 1996 Mike Leigh drama about an adopted black woman who finds out that her birth mother is white. He bought a ticket and even posed for photos with the cast backstage. This past February, a small theater company from L.A.’s Rockwell Table & Stage opened “Cruel Intentions: The Completely Unauthorized Musical Parody.” What did Phillippe do when faced with the idea of seeing some struggling actor mock his iconic role in song form? A role he reportedly got so into he actually threw up filming an emotional scene for? It’s time to give Ryan his due… HE’S NOT AFRAID TO POKE FUN AT HIMSELF One look at Ryan Phillippe’s resume and you have to ask yourself, “Why doesn’t this guy top every ‘Most Badass’ listicle on the internet?” It’s baffling when you consider how consistently the Secrets and Lies star has gone that extra mile, quietly going above and beyond no matter what role he’s asked to play, what objects he’s asked to insert, or whose lap he’s asked to grind on. Photo: The Howard Stern Show Take a second to appreciate the actor’s often-unappreciated cool
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