Whatever else happened, Emma still loves Parker and is wrecked by his suicide, which it would seem he was led to commit from the knowledge of her break from him. She breaks things off with Kit in a letter that we see him receive in “Once I Had a Love.” Once these two had love and it is more than apparent in S1E1 that this love never died. Though, as Pete notes, she has to lose the good things, too. Emma is a getting a new chance at life, which is surely something many of us have fantasized about, without the baggage of the past weighing us down. Or we want to be, bolstered by the narrative framing and the natural tendency as viewer to identify with protagonist. We know that she has done terrible things of some sort in the past-something about young girls, that it would seem Kit raped and killed…or they did this together?-but the details are withheld from us just enough to get us more or less on Emma’s side. The most interesting move that Tell Me Your Secrets makes as it gets going is in the way that it proceeds from Emma’s perspective. She decides that Emma will be kind, brave, and safe, but what was Karen? And can we demarcate her past from this present as we assess her character? The time frame of Tell Me Your Secrets is on the table within its narrative from the beginning, as we start in the past but with a scene that is already the aftermath of the past before the beginning that will form a certain nugget of mystery as the show establishes itself: what exactly did Karen/Emma (Lily Rabe) do with Kit Parker (Xavier Samuel)? What were his crimes and what were hers? How complicit was she, given that when we cut to “the present” we find her being released from prison and assuming the name Emma in order to start a new life for herself, list of words on a piece of paper and all. I should perhaps warn you that what follows will contain spoilers for that first episode, in case the title of my piece didn’t sufficiently make that clear. At this point I have only watched the first episode, though Amazon is releasing the season (or series, as it may turn out) all as a batch on Febru(today). The story, however, is a bit convoluted and I have yet to fully decide whether this is a strength or a weakness when it comes to the series as a whole. Which is only to pick out those at the top of the bill-the acting throughout Tell Me Your Secrets S1E1 is superb. And Enrique Murciano equally gives Pete a depth of character in his role as counselor to Karen/Emma. And then there is Hamish Linklater as John, who claims to be reformed or at least trying to be good, intriguing me immediately. Amy Brenneman’s character, Mary Barlow, may strike me as verging on the unrealistic at times in the first episode, but Brenneman herself is as good as ever in making this mother’s motivations and actions plausible. Lily Rabe is as powerful in her performance her as I’ve ever seen her. We know that TNT ended up passing on the series before it ultimately landed at Amazon Prime, but it clearly isn’t because of the cast. After watching S1E1 (“Once I Had a Love”), it is hard to tell which it will be. Tell Me Your Secrets (from the mind of Harriet Warner) seems destined to be either a small show with a cult following or a failed experiment that is more interesting in the conception of its idea than in its execution.
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