Television series

Liar

Name: Liar
Genre: Drama, Crime, Thriller
Released: 2017
Cast: Joanne Froggatt, Ioan Gruffudd

Liar is a British thriller built on one disputed night: did Andrew rape Laura, or did she imagine it? ITV plays it as a slick, escalating puzzle, each episode flipping your sympathy between two entirely plausible liars. It's pacey, glossy, occasionally implausible — comfort-thriller dressed up with a serious subject. Good for anyone who wants a twisty watch that argues with itself afterwards.

TVMaze rating

6.7

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Emily Watson stars as a scientist whose affair spirals into a sexual assault allegation and a courtroom reckoning; it's the closest cousin to Liar in subject and nerve, forcing you to keep revising who deserves belief.

But The courtroom section slows the pace right down; it's more interested in moral discomfort than thrills.

Doctor Foster2015

Suranne Jones is magnetic as a doctor unravelling her husband's betrayal with escalating, almost gleeful fury; same small-town-secrets energy and just as many jaw-drop swerves.

But The second series tips from tense into borderline soap-operatic, and some find the escalation exhausting rather than thrilling.

Big Little Lies2017

A starrier, glossier American cousin — a death, a marriage, and a chorus of unreliable witnesses picking apart what really happened, wrapped in gorgeous production and top-tier performances.

But It's more ensemble soap than tight two-hander, and the murder-mystery framing is used more as garnish than engine.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

I May Destroy You2020

Both start from an ambiguous, disputed sexual encounter and ask what happens to everyone around it — but where Liar turns that into a whodunit, this refuses the puzzle box and stays with the wound.

Michaela Coel's blistering series treats sexual assault not as plot mechanism but as lived, messy aftermath — funny, furious and formally daring in ways that make Liar's tidy thriller shape look almost polite.

But It's far rawer and more discomforting than Liar, with no genre scaffolding to soften the subject.

The Fall2013

Gillian Anderson hunts a killer whose perspective the show refuses to hide, turning who-do-you-trust into something colder and more clinical than Liar's warmer melodrama.

But It's slower and much darker — this is procedural dread, not date-night thriller, with no easy resolution.

The Cry2018no page yet

Jenna Coleman plays a mother whose account of a tragedy keeps shifting under pressure, in a dual-timeline thriller with Liar's same trick of making you distrust your own sympathy.

But The subject matter — a missing baby — is heavier and more upsetting than Liar's, with less pulpy relief.

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Jodie Comer stalks through a thriller about identity theft and hospital secrets with the same nervy, who's-really-lying momentum and the same appetite for a mid-series gut-punch.

But The stolen-identity premise is a bigger stretch of plausibility, and the plotting occasionally strains for its twists.

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A small-town murder unpicks every marriage and friendship it touches, with the same slow reveal of ordinary people's private failures that made Liar's finale land so hard.

But It's a longer, more grief-soaked series with less of Liar's pulpy propulsion — patience is required.

Angela Black2021no page yet

Joanne Froggatt again, this time trapped inside coercive control rather than accused of imagining it — a sharp companion piece on believability and who gets to tell the truth.

But It's grimmer and more claustrophobic, with fewer twists and more sustained dread than Liar's rollercoaster structure.

Unforgotten2015

A cold case reopens old lies across a handful of ordinary lives, offering the same pleasure of watching decent-seeming people turn out to be something else entirely.

But It's procedural and unhurried where Liar is breathless — better for a slow week than a binge.

Rashomon1950

Liar's entire engine — contradictory accounts of the same event, each internally convincing — is the device Rashomon invented decades before unreliable narration became a thriller staple.

Kurosawa's black-and-white classic gave cinema its founding he-said-she-said structure — four witnesses, one crime, no way to reconcile the versions — and it's still more unsettling than most modern imitators manage.

But Subtitled, 88 minutes of old-fashioned pacing, and it withholds resolution far more totally than Liar ever does.

Gone Girl2014

Same premise — a partner's disappearance and a fractured marriage force everyone to pick a side — but Gone Girl trades Liar's earnestness for cynicism, the darker, funnier version of the same trick.

David Fincher's pulpy, pitch-black film runs the same which-spouse-is-lying machinery as Liar but cranks it into satire — glossier, nastier, and far more willing to be gleefully cynical about marriage.

But It's colder and more misanthropic than Liar, with a media-circus subplot and a twist some find cruel rather than clever.