Shows Like

15 Shows Like Tell Me Lies — Toxic Love, Psychological Games, and Secrets That Destroy

Tell Me Lies got under your skin? These shows deliver the same obsessive relationships, psychological manipulation, dual timelines, and the sick pleasure of watching something fall apart.

15 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack

Section 1

The Tell Me Lies Formula

Tell Me Lies is about the specific terror of knowing someone is bad for you and choosing them anyway — and more uncomfortably, about being the person who is bad for someone else. Lucy and Stephen are both unreliable narrators. The show's brilliance is that it refuses to assign the damage cleanly. The dual timeline structure means you're always watching the present knowing something terrible is coming. These 15 shows understand that same toxic romantic alchemy. [Use our tool: Shows Like Tell Me Lies](/shows/similar/tell-me-lies) — algorithmically matched

Section 2

The Closest Matches

You

2018–2024

★7.7IMDb

Joe Goldberg works in a New York bookshop, meets a woman he decides is his soulmate, and starts methodically removing everyone between them. He narrates every step in a warm, self-aware inner voice that makes his logic completely readable — and that's the trap. Five seasons of obsessive love in new cities with new targets and a mounting body count.

Why it matters

Both shows force you into the perspective of someone doing irreparable damage while convincing themselves it's love. You signals Joe's villainy fairly early; Tell Me Lies keeps Stephen genuinely ambiguous longer, which makes the audience more uncomfortable about their own reading of him.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Normal People

2020

★8.0IMDb

Connell is popular in their small Irish town; Marianne is the weird rich girl everyone ignores. They start sleeping together in secret — he won't acknowledge her publicly at school, and that initial cruelty sets the pattern for everything that follows. The show tracks them through college and after, in and out of each other's lives, two people whose connection is real and genuine and still somehow keeps producing damage. Less thriller than Tell Me Lies, more ache. The physical intimacy is handled with unusual honesty.

Why it matters

The same obsessive central relationship, the same cycle of closeness and withdrawal, the same sense of people who can't stay together but can't quite separate.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Conversations with Friends

2022

★7.0IMDb

Frances and her ex-girlfriend Bobbi perform spoken word poetry in Dublin and meet a married couple — an actor and a journalist — who take them into their social orbit. Frances starts an affair with the husband, convinced she's approaching it intellectually, without attachment. She's wrong. Another Sally Rooney adaptation, and in some ways the sharper one: precise about the damage smart people do when they're certain they're above ordinary hurt.

Why it matters

A young woman convinced she's in control of a complicated situation — and spectacularly wrong — is exactly Tell Me Lies's territory.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Cruel Summer

2021–present

★7.4IMDb

The most popular girl in a small Texas town disappears in the summer of 1993. The same summer, a quieter girl starts inserting herself into the missing girl's life. The show shows the same day across three consecutive summers — the year it happened, the year after, and the trial year — slowly revealing what both girls knew and when. What looks like a teen drama is actually a psychological thriller about how badly we misread the people closest to us.

Why it matters

The structural similarity to Tell Me Lies is exact. Both shows use dual timelines to create dread — you watch the past knowing what's coming, and the show exploits that gap mercilessly.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Daisy Jones & The Six

2023

★8.0IMDb

A Pittsburgh rock band is on the verge of breaking through when a charismatic, self-destructive singer-songwriter joins them. The creative chemistry between her and the lead singer is enormous. The romantic chemistry is enormous. They're terrible for each other. The show is structured as a documentary — present-day interviews framing the story of what happened in 1977 — which creates the same effect as Tell Me Lies's timeline split: you watch the past knowing it ends in wreckage.

Why it matters

Both shows are about relationships that feel like fate and produce damage. One of the most stylish shows of recent years.

Section 3

The Toxic Relationship Shows

The Affair

2014–2019

★7.9IMDb

A married novelist meets a waitress on Long Island one summer and they have an affair. The show then depicts the same events twice — once from each of their perspectives — and the two accounts don't match. Details change. Motivations shift. Who pursued whom depends on who's remembering it. Later seasons expand to other characters' competing accounts of the same events. The formal conceit is extraordinary: truth exists only as remembered by people with reasons to distort it.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Anatomy of a Scandal

2022

★7.1IMDb

A charismatic British cabinet minister is accused of raping a former aide. His wife sits in the gallery at the trial, certain he's innocent, watching the prosecution barrister systematically dismantle the story she's believed about her marriage. Based on Sarah Vaughan's novel. The show is a psychological thriller about power: who gets believed, why certain men are protected, and what wives tell themselves to survive. Six episodes.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Fleishman Is in Trouble

2022

★7.5IMDb

Toby Fleishman's wife drops the kids off one morning and disappears — no explanation, no contact. He's left managing their children and his career and his post-divorce dating life while trying to understand what happened. The show spends most of its run inside Toby's perspective, then systematically dismantles it. Claire Danes's performance in the final two episodes is extraordinary and recontextualizes everything you've watched. One of the most politically smart things television has done with a marriage in years.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Behind Her Eyes

2021

★7.2IMDb

Louise, a single mother, meets a man at a bar, sleeps with him, then discovers the next day he's her new boss. She starts an affair with him while his wife separately befriends her, and she's trying to manage both relationships without either knowing. The show has a supernatural undercurrent that builds to one of the most talked-about twists in recent TV history. Go in knowing as little as possible. Six episodes.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Section 4

The Psychological Drama Shows

Big Little Lies

2017–2019

★8.4IMDb

Five women in Monterey, California send their kids to the same elementary school. Someone gets murdered at a school fundraiser. The show spends seven episodes revealing whose life was bad enough to produce a murder. Lavish houses, breathtaking views, domestic abuse behind closed doors, and secrets everyone in the neighborhood half-knows. Based on Liane Moriarty's novel. The first season is formally perfect; the second, despite troubled production, has Nicole Kidman doing career-best work.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Clickbait

2021

★6.7IMDb

A man is kidnapped and videos appear online: he's holding a sign claiming he abused women, promising he'll die when the views reach a million. His family insists it's impossible. As they scramble to find him, darker information about who he actually was keeps surfacing. An eight-episode thriller about how little we know the people closest to us and how easily we construct narratives about people based on what we want to believe.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Obsession

2023

★5.7IMDb

A successful London surgeon meets his son's new girlfriend and begins a compulsive sexual affair with her. The son doesn't know. Everyone else is getting hurt. Four episodes, dark and explicit, based on the French film "Une Liaison Pornographique." Not for everyone — but if Tell Me Lies's erotic thriller elements were the appeal, this goes considerably further with fewer apologies.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Tiny Beautiful Things

2023

★7.8IMDb

Clare is in her late thirties, her marriage is falling apart, and she becomes the anonymous advice columnist "Dear Sugar" almost by accident. Answering strangers' questions about love and loss forces her to look at her own past — the recklessness of her younger self, the damage she did, the ways she's still carrying it. The show jumps between her present and her past, both versions sharing scenes. Less thriller than Tell Me Lies but the same territory: past choices haunting the present, the gap between who we were and what we told ourselves about it.

Section 5

The International Picks

Four More Shots Please!

2019–present

★7.1IMDb

Four very different women in Mumbai — a divorced mother, a sports journalist, a bisexual gym owner, a lawyer-in-training — are best friends navigating careers, relationships, and the particular compromises modern Indian women make between what they want and what their families expect. They also drink a lot and make spectacular decisions they immediately regret. Less thriller than Tell Me Lies and more messy comedy-drama, but the honesty about destructive relationship patterns and the way smart women enable each other's worst choices makes it sharper than it first appears.

One Day

2024

★7.5IMDb

Emma and Dexter spend one night together on the last day of university in 1988, and the show checks in on them once a year for the next twenty years. Sometimes together, mostly not, always gravitating back. The show is about a relationship that defines both of them — not because it's healthy, but because it's inescapable. Each annual visit is haunted by knowledge of what came before and what's coming next. Anne Hathaway is exceptional throughout.

Find similar shows Where to watch

Section 6

Quick Match Guide

| Want... | Watch | |---------|-------| | Same POV manipulation | You | | Literary, less thriller | Normal People, Conversations with Friends | | Same dual-timeline structure | Cruel Summer, The Affair | | More mystery, bigger twist | Behind Her Eyes | | Prestige drama version | Big Little Lies | | Shorter commitment | Anatomy of a Scandal (6 episodes) | | International equivalent | Four More Shots Please (Indian) | | Musical, stylized version | Daisy Jones & The Six |

Section 7

Want More?

- [Full list: Shows Like Tell Me Lies](/shows/similar/tell-me-lies) — 20+ algorithmic matches - [Psychological thriller shows](/shows/mood/psychological-thriller) — mind games and manipulation - [Toxic romance shows](/shows/mood/toxic-romance) — love that destroys - [College drama shows](/shows/mood/college) — campus obsession - [What show should I watch?](/shows/discover) — random recommendation

More from Shows Like

15 Shows Like Desperate Housewives — Suburban Secrets, Murder Mysteries, and Delicious Drama

Wisteria Lane left a void no other street could fill — until these shows arrived. Suburban scandals, female ensembles, dark secrets, and the soapy drama that keeps you watching at 1am.

15 Shows Like Dexter — Serial Killers, Dark Antiheroes, and Psychological Tension

If Dexter's blood-spatter analyst by day, vigilante killer by night premise hooked you, these shows deliver the same dark antihero thrills, psychological complexity, and moral ambiguity.

15 Shows Like Downton Abbey — Upstairs, Downstairs, and Unmissable Drama

Finished Downton Abbey and need something to fill the void? These shows deliver the same lavish period drama, class tension, family secrets, and compulsive storytelling.