Lie To Me: The Complete Third And Final Season

Lie To Me didn't stand a chance. During its time on air, it was routinely dropped during sweeps and bumped to mid-season, demonstrating the lack of confidence Fox had in it. But it came back for a third season, which was subsequently cut to just 13 episodes when the ratings kept slipping. It was finally taken behind Fox HQ and put to sleep without getting the chance to tie up its loose ends – they even introduced a new character in the last episode, so they didn't even see it coming. For the uninitiated, Lie To Me was all about Cal Lightman (still played wonderfully by Tim Roth) and his band of lie-spotting investigators, the Lightman Group. They get involved in a variety of different cases where there's some kind of doubt about who did or didn't do what, and by studying suspects' body language and behaviour are able to discover the real perpetrator. It's an intriguing idea and had some initial potential, which it unfortunately couldn't live up to. At the start of this last season, the writers appeared to have given up. Any subtlety that existed when the show first debuted was completely gone and Tim Roth's character is inserted into the middle of every plot. For example, when he heads to a mental hospital to reassess a patient, he ends up becoming a patient. Or when he has to work out what happened at a fatal car accident, he ends up having a car accident and so on. Obviously the show was running out of ways of keeping the whole lie detection premise fresh and by simply moving it into the background it became a lot less interesting, and now it's gone forever. That's for the best because it was definitely most effective during its first season. The four-DVD set reflects a similar attitude of a show defeated. It does state there are some special features, but five minutes of deleted scenes and a very brief featurette from the Fox Movie Channel on Tim Roth's character hardly make this a must-have purchase, even for the most devoted fans.