(TV SERIES) One of Us is Lying Season 1 - Interesting Enough Murder Mystery Series in High School

During last weekend, I started to watch this series. There were actually tons of new and ongoing series available on Netflix in the past few weeks, but I decided with this one as it intrigued me the most with its premise. Well, I will get into it now.

Brief Story Line

In Bayview Highschool, there was an online gossip group called About That which was moderated by Simon (Mark McKenna - Sing Street etc) who was best friend with Janae (Jessica McLeod). On the first day after the summer holiday, five students that included popular cheerleader Addy (Annalisa Cochrane), a straight A student Bronwyn (Marianly Tejada), a talented baseball pitcher Cooper (Chibuikem Uche), the school's bad boy/drug dealer Nate (Cooper van Grootel) and Simon were put in detention.

However, an incident happened during the detention and one of them died. Due to suspicious circumstances, the remaining students were suspected by the police and became infamously called Bayview Four. 

So what actually happened? You can find them all in this series.

End of Brief Story Line

So this series was actually quite interesting. From the first episode, we already got to see one of the students died which set us up with a truly intriguing mystery of whodunit. What made me enjoy the series was the development of all the characters with each individual student having secrets of his/her own which seemed justifiable to make him or her as a suspect. The problem was typically what teenagers would face but not especially dark and really heavy, as I think that was not the main focus. 

The story itself was pretty well done. As shown on the credits, I noticed that it was based on the novel with the same title written by Karen M. McManus. It was published back in 2017 and received critical acclaim. After reading a bit info on the novel, I found out that it has a slight different ending with the series. I think it was due to the writers were heading to a different direction in season 2. Yes, this one has been renewed for a second season which should be interesting, even if it did seem a bit unoriginal (I have a feeling it's going to have a I Know What You Did Last Summer vibe). There might also be similarity with Gossip Girl (funnily mentioned in one of the episodes here).

The investigation into the mystery was quite fun. Although it might not be so sophisticated, but it was enough to keep me interested and guessing on what really happened. There were one or two times that I guessed wrongly due to the intelligent deception by the writers. The revealing of the crime was not really satisfying to me personally as it was not by the power of deduction. Nevertheless, it could still be forgiven considering these are high school students after all and not some kind of experienced detective.

The relatively unfamiliar cast did their job adequately, although once again the problem of casting real teenagers still a major issue as most of them here are in their twenties. In addition to the cast I mentioned above, there were also other important characters such as Bronwyn's younger sister Maeve (Melissa Collazo), Addy's boyfriend Jake (Barret Carnahan), the teacher Mrs. Avery (Andi Crown), Addy's cheerleader friends Vanessa (Sara Thompson) & Keely (Zenia Marshall) and few others. 

Of all the 8 episodes, my favorite one surprisingly was not the finale but the 6th episode which despite all the rather cheesy high school drama still managed to give some excitement. Oh there was also a very nice cover version of Don't You (Forget About Me) in this episode. The original song that was sung by Simple Minds was the soundtrack of the very popular and critically acclaimed movie The Breakfast Club, which coincidentally also a story about students in detention. Btw, the title of each episode always began with the words "One of Us is" which was kind of unique. 

Overall, this is a pretty fun mystery series set in high school. It has an intriguing mystery that raised curiosity on my side of who was the actual murderer and how it was done. The tone of the series was quite light and the problems faced by the teens were pretty standard but might be a bit too unexplored for some. I like the characters dynamics though strangely enough, there was no one that I could single out as my favorite. Second season could be interesting, even if it might be having similar premise to other series. So if you are looking for series focusing on murder mystery solving in high school where the teenagers had to deal with their own problems but not having a very dark tone, then you could give it a try. It's a Peacock streaming original series but lucky for us in Asia that we can still watch it via Netflix.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars