Critic Reviews

Lie to Me seems an unusually meaty, thoughtful and thought-provoking crime drama--another police procedural, yes, but one with a dramatic and mesmerizing difference. The strength of the premise combined with first-class production make this easily one of the season's best new shows.

OK, fine, so maybe the pilot does wrap up with your typical teary-eyed confession. Otherwise, though, Lie to Me is as thoroughly entertaining and charming as its fine-looking cast of characters.

Roth's Lightman is not nearly the curmudgeon Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) is, nor is he as entertaining, but Lie to Me has the makings of a fine procedural for viewers who can't seem to get enough of this type of series.

Roth makes for a tartly witty hero, the mysteries are intricately plotted, and the show makes the most of the weird dynamics of an office where the boss can ferret out everybody's secrets.

Based on the first episode, the team seems to work about two cases at a time, and while neither of tonight's feels wildly creative--one warns of the downside to an intense religious upbringing, the other catches an elected official in an ethics scandal--both are engagingly told, with humor and little twists.

There is an appealing cheekiness to the show’s insistence on dressing up hunch work as the purview of serious science.

Lie to Me's pilot is brisk anthropological fun.

The show's gimmick does extend beyond reading expressions--they analyze voices and psychoanalyze answers--and the show does have its amusing moments. What it doesn't have is any sense of surprise, and once the novelty factor wears off, you just wonder whether there's enough here to sustain a series.

Lie to Me comes out of the box strong, and it's especially encouraging that the cases at hand and the science used in the first hour is compelling enough that Roth's character (based on Paul Ekman, a real-life expert on lying and microexpressions, among other things) can evolve more slowly.

This [is a] crisply shot, well-paced drama: It could venture into the darker and knottier realms of morality, as “House” did in its first few seasons.