We Were Liars series review: No one cares what you did last summer

However many synonyms one finds for dreadful, they will not be enough to describe this lazy adaptation of E. Lockhart’s 2014 YA psychological thriller. The characters are largely unlikeable, and things do not go well for the only loveable ones — Frances and Eleanor, the sweet, goofy golden retrievers.

The Sinclairs are an obscenely rich family who always summer at Beechwood, their private island. Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind) is the eldest Sinclair grandchild. She remembers the Beechwood summers as being a time of fun and games with her cousins, Mirrin (Esther McGregor) and Johnny (Joseph Zada), and Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), the little Indian boy who Cadence found in the boathouse and who is then absorbed into the Sinclair fold.

Harris (David Morse) is the Sinclair patriarch who believes strongly in “the Sinclair way.” His three daughters — Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald), Cadence’s mum; Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Johnny’s mother; and Bess (Candice King), Mirrin’s mum,— have disappointed him.

Cadence names the summers by her age. While summers until she turns 16 are golden, Summer 16 goes wrong, and Cadence finds herself washed ashore on the beach with no memory of what happened.

In Summer 17, Cadence returns to Beechwood to find things changed and no one willing to tell her what happened the previous summer. The island-in-the-sun setting combined with a benevolent tyrant and a death does not make for an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit. We Were Liars plods along ponderously, ambushed by stereotypes at every corner. Colonialism, racism, privilege, “outrage addiction,” and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are skipped past in a shallow checklist.

The three sisters have their own issues. Carrie is a recovering addict, Bess’s husband Brody (Dylan Bruce) has embezzled his clients’ money and the trust fund, and Bess is having an affair. The three women need money and on their mother, Tipper’s (Wendy Crewson) passing, the gloves are off as the women plot to get all the Sinclair money and Tipper’s pearls.

Harris uses his wealth to control his daughters in a pale imitation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Ed (Rahul Kohli), Gat’s uncle, is in a long-term relationship with Carrie, who is torn between love and all that lovely Sinclair money as Papa Sinclair will not countenance a marriage to an Indian.

The second generation of Sinclairs have standard rich-people problems: from artistic Merrin feeling she is not seen, to Johnny’s easy use of his privilege. Gat goes to India for the holidays and returns enlightened, which in turn prompts Cadence to question her generational wealth and her grandfather’s ivory collection.

There is also the annual lemon race where everyone dresses in shades of yellow, and which Cadence denounces as more colonialism, apart from many other non-events dotted through the eight episodes till we come to the big twist, by which time no one cares what happens to these spoilt rich people.

The clothes are nice and beachy, but all the women seem to have gone out of their way to have terrible hair. Cadence dyeing her hair black works as a visual cue if one wishes to differentiate between Summer 16 and Summer 17. The voice-over is flat, and the struggles of the cast with their thinly-written parts are obvious. There are plot points that go nowhere, including one about the fourth Sinclair daughter — unless that is going to be revealed in Season 2. Shudder.

We Were Liars is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video