For TV’s Newest Crime Fighter, the Lips May Lie, but the Face Tells the Truth

During the past decade, Fox has rarely been the place to go looking for the lessons in collectivism manifest on series like “The Unit” and “Lost” and “Law & Order,” all of which pay tribute to collaborative problem-solving on networks not owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fox doesn’t smell like team spirit. It is a Randian territory of lone saviors (Jack Bauer, John Connor, Gregory House) bushwhacking through impending catastrophe with the weaponry of a singular genius.

The latest addition to the stable is the human polygraph Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth). His gift is determining the criminality of white supremacists, wayward teenagers, Congressional ethics committee chairmen and any and all dubious-seeming Homo sapiens on the basis of shifting body language — “micro-expressions” — which has the effect of turning him into a one-man F.B.I.-municipal police force-Department of Homeland Security on the new series “Lie to Me” (beginning Wednesday).

In addition to his law enforcement efforts, Lightman appears to be a hot ticket on the lecture circuit, where he offers a delicious flashback pageant of public impropriety and heinous misconduct, producing PowerPoint images of Kato Kaelin, O. J. Simpson, Eliot Spitzer, Saddam Hussein, whose sneers and sniggers and pursed lips he has studied like a rabbinical student hunkering down with the Book of Job.

Lightman himself is a fruit basket of stereotype — cocky, infallible, petulant, divorced, burdened by his proficiencies — who has spent decades reading faces and pronouncing certainties: “If your suspect is surprised for more than one second, he is faking it.” The show further embeds the network’s individualist ideologies with a view that suggests private industry can always go the government suits one better. No line item for the Office of Management and Budget, Lightman operates under the auspices of his own consulting firm, the Washington-based Lightman Group, which the feds reluctantly seek out when they are tripped up, presumably by their own inexorable incompetence.

The government minions forced to deal with Lightman on the ground swallow the idea like children forced to take castor oil. “Personally, I think what you do is a joke,” one of them lets him know. But Lightman has his own minions, and thus his own devotees, the people who work for him in his all-white-and-steel, airy-truth-palace of an office. Chief among them is Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams), a behavioral analyst saddled with the task of speaking in earnest exposition and made not to drink Lightman’s Kool-Aid so much as gulp it from the tap.

“Lie to Me” is an invitation to follow her lead, and in some sense it isn’t all that easy to decline the offer. There is an appealing cheekiness to the show’s insistence on dressing up hunch work as the purview of serious science. And there is some legitimacy to the claim: the series is based on the research of Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, who is a specialist in nonverbal communication and what his publishers call deception strategies.

Nancy Drew was pretty good at breaking down deception strategies, too. So was Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde.” Throughout the history of modern popular culture we’ve gone in and out of defining female intelligence in terms of intuitive displays. I’m not sure what it means that television’s reigning intuitionists are now male (Lightman joins the strike force of Adrian Monk and “The Mentalist’s” Patrick Jane). And I’m not sure whether the regendering is a democratizing net positive for feminism or whether we should take offense that women’s intuition translates somewhere along the spectrum of cute while its male counterpart is meant to suggest the power of a mind brilliantly deducing.

Against my better judgment, I suspect I’ll keep watching “Lie to Me” until I figure it out.

LIE TO ME

Fox, Wednesday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Created and written by Samuel Baum; directed by Robert Schwentke; Brian Grazer, David Nevins, Steven Maeda and Mr. Baum, executive producers; Dustin Thomason, co-executive producer; Tom Szentgyorgyi, consulting producer; Josh Singer, supervising producer. Produced by Imagine Television in association with 20th Century Fox Television.

WITH: Tim Roth (Dr. Cal Lightman), Kelli Williams (Dr. Gillian Foster), Monica Raymund (Ria Torres) and Brendan Hines (Eli Loker).

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Lie to Me - An early look

If there's one thing we know about the American television landscape, it's that there just aren't enough procedurals on the air. And while CBS has managed to snatch most of them up before anyone else can get their hands on one, it looks like FOX managed to sneak one by the almighty Eye. And as with most crime dramas of this sort, it must differentiate itself from the others by having a little twist all its own. Lie to Me offers that twist in the form of Tim Roth's character, Cal Lightman, who is essentially a human lie detector.

Loosely based on the findings of author and professor of psychology Paul Ekman, FOX was kind enough to send along Ekman's book, Telling Lies, with the pilot so I could follow along and see which of his strategies were used on the show. Yeah, I didn't do that.

There may not be a person alive who's analyzed the art of lying and the liar more than Ekman, so certainly the show is in capable hands with him involved. FOX may just have a successful formula established here and could have another House-sized hit on their hands. Find out for yourself when the pilot drops tonight (1/21/09) at 9/8 Central.

I loved the recruitment technique Lightman used to bring Ria Torres (Monica Raymund) into the fold; pretending to be suspicious at the airport to get her to pull him from the line. Her introduction to Eli Loker, also a part of the team and, apparently, someone who always speaks the truth, was fairly entertaining. I wonder if this is some sort of medical condition or a lifestyle choice that he's actually able to maintain. It's nice to know that he's "fair" in bed, I guess, and that he does, in fact, have a chance with Torres in the sack. Every show needs some sexual tension among the core cast.

Both the A and B stories were intriguing, and both had twists and turns to keep them from following cliche paths. Now I say that as someone who doesn't watch all of these procedurals regularly, so it's quite possible both of these plotlines have been covered extensively on Law & Numb3rs: Without a Criminal NCSI Mentalist.

The A-plot focused on a murdered teacher and the web of lies protecting a high school principal who'd impregnated one of his students in an affair. Believe me, we were nowhere near this when the episode began, so it was an impressive maneuver to get there. The B-plot was just as delightfully unexpected as we went from a congressman having sex with a prostitute to a man trying to reconnect with his daughter and turn her from such a dark and shameful profession. In the end, Lightman even lied to the client (the DNC) to protect the congressman's daughter, allowing him to resign in potential disgrace.

It's not my fault I found myself paying such close attention to the little details during the show. They made me do it. But here's what I noticed:

* Tim Roth wears glasses normally, or at least while on the set between takes because he had a visible glasses line on the right side of his face coming forward from his ear.
* Lechero (Robert Wisdom) survived his time in SONA and now he works as a guard at another prison. Cosmic karma maybe?
* I think the actors are overly aware of their facial expressions on this show, considering its nature, and are therefore overdoing it slightly.
* The famous photos and video footage of various people matching expressions tied to lies and emotional responses are a nice touch. It helps to resonate truth with the lying philosophy the show is supporting.
* "Are you going to try and have sex with my daughter tonight?" It must be nice to be able to read faces so well that you can just throw the question out there and you'll get the truth, no matter what they say.
* It was a nice moment at the end when Cal turned to confront the poor woman who was seeing the married guy after he lied to her about leaving his wife for her. Sometimes you just can't let it go.

It kind of brings up an interesting point that may be addressed in future installments. The notion that Cal is always in "lie detector mode" could prove problematic for his personal life. It may be a major factor in his own failed marriage and could be interesting to see him trying to turn it off. I could imagine plenty of times, for example, where you wouldn't want to know that someone was lying to you if you asked them: "Was that good for you?"

I think this is a solid entry in the world of crime television. I'm not the kind of person who can really watch more than two to three episodes of any of these variations, but considering the ratings map, I'm in the minority on that. Therefore, I can say with confidence that Lie to Me deserves a place in the land of success for being very good at what it does. It's smart and slickly produced with intriguing characters. And it's always fun to catch people in lies.

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