Dramatizing toxic relationships can be tricky, just ask the filmmakers and cast of “It Ends With Us." While the movie about a woman who falls in love with a man who abuses her has been a box office success, it prompted discourse about whether it glorified domestic violence.The Hulu series “Tell Me Lies,” now streaming its second season, is about an on again-off again relationship between Lucy and Stephen (Grace Van Patten and Jackson White).
Their relationship isn't physically abusive, but it is unhealthy.Meaghan Oppenheimer, executive producer and showrunner, says she's very mindful of respecting the weight of early relationships on a person's life.
She says at that age “you're learning how to love and what love is.”“This age is so important, and I think most people when they write about YA, they don’t take it seriously," said Oppenheimer."There’s sort of a flippant aspect to some of it.”In "Tell Me Lies,'' she also wanted to tap into how people sometimes romanticize unhealthy relationships with the justification that the harder they are to maintain, the stronger the connection.“As you mature, hopefully you realize that happiness is the most exciting thing.
The back-and-forth relationships, the on and off, they’re actually really boring because they follow the same cycle, and there’s never any actual growth," she said.We've all known someone like Lucy, have been Lucy, or even Stephen, says Oppenheimer.“We’ve all had that friend, and a lot of us have been that friend.It’s wild what we do to ourselves in pursuit of love and sex.
We accept behavior and treatment that we would never accept in any other part of our life, and we can be the most hurtful."Van Patten says she “can totally relate” to Lucy's clouded judgement when it comes to Stephen.“I definitely relate to being really young and not knowing who I am and grasping and pretending I knew who I was and losing myself in certain situations that I thought were priorities at th...