‘We Were Liars’ Creators & Author On Show’s Social Consciousness

Prime Video’s We Were Liars offers a twisty murder mystery with the nostalgia of young love and carefree summers that, underneath the surface, also tackles themes of social consciousness from racism to classism and more.

After an upbringing filled with immense privilege, the show’s four titular teenage characters — Cadence Sinclair Eastman (Emily Alyn Lind), Gatwick Patil (Shubham Maheshwari), Johnny Sinclair Dennis (Joseph Zada) and Mirren Sinclair Sheffield (Esther McGregor) — start to challenge their elders quite often during Summer 16 on Beechwood Island, the first of two summers that audiences follow with the crew.

Cadence describes the adults in the family as as “old-money Democrats.” She and her cousins see their family as the kind of people who mean well but don’t often challenge their own prejudices, despite acknowledging systemic oppression. As the summer progresses, they increasingly at odds with patriarch Harris Sinclair (David Morse), matriarch Tipper (Wendy Crewson), and their daughters Penny (Caitlin Fitzgerald), Carrie (Mamie Gummer) and Bess (Candice King).

For the television adaptation’s creators Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie, this theme from the 2014 novel was a paramount thread to pull upon and expand for the series, which is now streaming all eight episodes.

“The book was written when probably you could interview many young, certainly financially privileged white people, and they wouldn’t even know there was another definition of the word privilege,” Plec told Deadline. “And while we were making it, starting in the early 2020s when we were writing it, that word was right there with us, the most important part of the whole piece. By the time we finished it, that word was starting to get thrown back in people’s faces.”

It’s the arrival of Carrie’s boyfriend Ed (Rahul Kohli) and his nephew Gat, middle class New Yorkers of Indian descent, one summer when the three Sinclair cousins — Cadence, Mirren and Johnny — are young that provides fodder for the discriminatory dynamics of the older generations to clash with those of the younger.

“We really had to go on the journey with society and its evolution and, frankly, devolution, to strike just the right balance of these young kids having their eyes open to something for the first time in a society right now, where even the idea of that is controversial,” Plec added. “It felt so obvious, when we sat down a couple years ago, to really lean into the idea of a young woman awakening to the consequences of her own privilege, but with the cultural landscape ever changing and the progressive point of view ever broadening, it was a very dainty dance to have to make sure we got it right without eliciting our own eye rolls.”

One scene of many that broadened the tension between the younger generation of Sinclairs and their elders occurs in Episode 7 when Cadence calls out her late grandmother’s favorite summer tradition, The Lemon Hunt, for exacerbating their privilege by not acknowledging that lemons are a symbol of colonization and genocide.

Specifically, she cites Christopher Columbus bringing the citrus fruit seeds to the Americas, reminding her family of the destruction that colonizers brought to the continent. She adds that Gat read about this when her mother tries to play it off as her intelligence that will get her into Harris’ alma mater, Harvard.

Plec pitched the scene as “a really long, drawn out” moment with “the whole family at the dinner table,” according to Carina Adly MacKenzie, who helmed the construction of this confrontation. She called the moment “one of those tense dinners where there’s somebody at the table saying untoward things” that prompts an “inner battle” to confront them.

“We had already seen a scene where the Liars don’t necessarily make that confrontation,” MacKenzie told Deadline, calling back to an earlier moment in the fifth episode when Harris uses the words “oriental” and “China Girl” to describe a woman who procured ivory for him and Tipper. “So this was the moment. Doing the research on the lemons, I sort of discovered that you can find any random thing and trace its history backwards and encounter some horrible thing. So conveniently, yeah, it was there.”

Gat’s character further serves as a catalyst for many of the conversations about privilege both in the novel and in the show, at least between the Liars. It factors heavily into the romance that blooms between Cadence and Gat throughout the story. Gat points this out to Cadence as a major reason he started dating Raquel over her because Raquel knew him and his full experience in life, whereas Cadence only knew the version of him that came to Beechwood Island.

At first, Cadence doesn’t think this matters in her love for Gat, but as the show progresses, she realizes he’s right. A different scene sparks the initial argument when the Liars are playing scrabble, and Gat brings up who likely owned Beechwood Island before Harris — Native Americans. Johnny tells Gat to shut up, and Cady jokingly parrots Johnny, but Gat takes offense and storms off. They then work it out after a conversation about it. Later in the show, three of the Liars also stand up to Harris for his treatment of Gat and Ed when the pair have left the island.

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“You get the sense that this is sort of a new concept for Cadence in looking at herself. You get the sense, for Johnny, that this is a thing that he is already resentful of. For Gat, it is starting to brew new emotions about things he thought he understood. It’s a spectrum,” MacKenzie said. “One thing that helps is that we weren’t trying to make any of the characters perfect. In that sense, they’re still learning, all of them are still learning. So the messiness of awakening could be a realistic messiness. This show definitely isn’t necessarily one of those shows that wraps up with a nice moral at the end. It’s all very messy.”

Author E. Lockhart, who served as an executive producer on the show, echoed Plec and MacKenzie’s sentiments with her interpretation of the theme, as she set the foundation of it with her novel.

“The book and the show are both about the moment when, as teenagers, you start to realize that the family that is your family of origin may be terrible or may be just difficult, or may be wrong on certain fronts, or may have certain family legends and stories that they tell that are not completely true and that your values may be different from your family of origin’s, so you start to define yourself differently,” she said. “That might take the shape of rebellion. It might take other kinds of shapes. It’s not completely universal, but a near universal experience of young adulthood, and I think it’s a really exciting moment in anybody’s life, and so We Were Liars is a is a big dramatization of of that.”

Lockhart also credited the diverse writers’ room, which included four writers of Indian descent, with expanding this main vein of her book. Plec and MacKenzie say these writers were very influential in determining Gat’s fate and involvement in the ending of the story, which readers know takes quite a turn, deviating a bit from the end of the novel.

“They were excellent television writers, but they also shared a bunch of their lived experience so that the characters of Ed and Gat are fleshed out and more nuanced and more authentic than I could have ever made them in the novel,” she said. “I felt so lucky that those people were on our team and were able to make these characters bigger and better.”

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