Reading between the lies

With the first season of Lie to Me completed, Paul Ekman is ready to assign grades to the Fox drama he inspired:

A-minus for entertainment value, B-plus for realism.

Ekman, a professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco and a social psychologist who works in the area of deception and demeanour, said 85 per cent of what Lie to Me depicts is accurate.

"Baum does care to get it right," Ekman said.

He was speaking of Samuel Baum, who created the show after learning about Ekman's work using facial expressions and verbal tics to help determine whether someone is telling the truth.

"I thought a franchise set around someone who did that kind of work would give real scope to the kinds of cases you could explore -- one week a political thriller, one week a family drama," Baum said. "A little movie every week."

He centred the show on a character named Cal Lightman (played by Tim Roth), an in-your-face investigator who leads a firm that helps law enforcement and government agencies.

The Lightman Group -- partner Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams), newcomer Ria Torres (Monica Raymund) and researcher Eli Loker (Brendan Hines) -- is typically hired to investigate crimes. But occasionally its clients are people such as a multimillionaire who wants to know whether his fiancée really loves him.

Raymund, whose character is a natural at reading people's expressions, went into the series with a working knowledge of Ekman's studies. A self-professed "science geek," she'd read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, which discusses Ekman's insights into human behaviour and micro-expressions -- those brief, rapid flashes of emotion that communicate what a person is truly feeling.

After 13 episodes, she's found her character's abilities seeping into her real life. Raymund said she recently ran into an acquaintance she hadn't seen for several years. "When she saw me, she said, 'Hey, good to see you, Monica.' I could tell, just from the science I'm learning from the show, she wasn't really genuinely happy to see me."

Baum's intention when he created the series wasn't to teach anyone how to catch a liar -- or to instruct them in how to lie better. Rather, he hoped to present situations where there's a cost to telling a lie as well as to telling the truth.

"Is there a requisite amount of dishonesty necessary for marriage to flourish?" he asked. "For friendship? How much dishonesty should exist in the workplace among colleagues? Between boss and employee?"

Initially, Baum planned to make macro-photography -- extreme closeups of tiny facial movements -- an integral part of each show. But the visual style quickly changed to accommodate the audience, which wanted to try to spot the micro-expressions made by the characters being interrogated.

However, he's kept another feature -- images of famous people (a Dick Cheney sneer, a Bill Clinton lip bite) that, when compared with a suspect's expressions, provide context for viewers.

"Some of the science is so mind-blowing, I didn't think people would believe it was real without some of the famous examples," Baum said.

He said he wants the show to be as realistic as possible. And it had better be: Ekman, who carries the title of scientific adviser for the show, blogs about each episode at www.fox.com/blogs/lietome. He's typically blunt in his assessments.

"One of my concerns about the Lie to Me series has been that Lightman always caught the liar," he wrote about the season finale. "I don't. I sometimes miss. There is no perfect, foolproof way to catch liars, and I bet there never will be."

The series, which is airing repeats through the summer, is scheduled to launch its second season on Sept. 28.

Lie to Me airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on Fox.

-- Special to The Washington Post

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 9, 2009 E5