![]() When she starts to pepper them with questions about that night, Sam gets impatient and uncomfortable. Still, the notion of the girl being a sort-of “bad seed” didn’t feel particularly convincing, and made Ben’s sacrifice – motivated by guilt regarding how his extramarital affair had upset the family – feel questionable, even beyond the moral ambiguity the ending (on TV, anyway) was intended to evoke. To simplify: He’s rich, and he is the one Christy was with the night of Tom’s murder. After that, though, the series became increasingly overheated (a fairly common criticism among ABC dramas), with Ben turning into a junior detective in his efforts to exonerate himself, largely because the detective who fielded the case, Andrea Cornell (Juliette Lewis), had fixated on him as the killer.Ĭornell achieved a measure of redemption toward the end, identifying (if not revealing) the true killer in the penultimate episode. It’s too bad, since “Secrets and Lies” exhibited moments of promise, especially in the early going as it captured how the media jackals descended on Ben and his family. Frankly, the net effect of that flourish was a momentary doubt that this was, in fact, the finale – an all-the-more-irritating stunt, given that the program’s future remains very much up in the air. The program also ended on an unnecessarily cryptic note, seeking to drive viewers to ABC’s Website for an additional twist, offering a more coherent sense of closure. That revelation followed the perhaps inevitable parade of red herrings, which left nearly every significant cast member – including Phillippe’s Ben Crawford, given that he was drugged and couldn’t fully account for his actions at first – a suspect at one moment or another. ![]() versions of such programs go, can derive at best modest satisfaction from being better than “Gracepoint,” Fox’s slightly tweaked stab at “Broadchurch.”īeyond that, the finale (and SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched) yielded the same killer as the Australian series upon which it was based, with the main character’s 12-year-old daughter (Belle Shouse) having slain what turned out to be her half-brother. That wrinkle, and the casting of Ryan Phillippe as the Everyman at its center, provided the distinguishing element in the ABC limited series that concluded Sunday, which, as U.S. With the benefit of hindsight, all “ Secrets and Lies” really offered – in a strange subgenre of drama built around a murdered child – was a shift in perspective, by putting the focus squarely on the wrongly accused as opposed to the cops.
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