Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1, Episode 1 recap: Once I Had a Love
By Mads Lennon
Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1 finally airs a few years late. Is it worth the wait?
It’s finally here. After years of gestating in the dark abyss where television shows occasionally vanish to, Tell Me Your Secrets Season 1 (formerly titled Deadlier Than the Male) has arrived in all its southern gothic glory on Amazon Prime Video.
The series, which was originally conceived for TNT, finished filming a couple of years ago now before getting canned by the network. That’s not necessarily a dig at the quality of the show, the acclaimed Raised by Wolves was also kicked to the curb in favor of HBO Max. TNT has undergone a significant retooling with Warner Bros. Television shifting most of its mature scripted programming to HBO Max and networks like TNT moving to more unscripted fare. Current shows Animal Kingdom and Claws are also both ending soon.
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However, it is odd that the show wasn’t simply moved to the streaming service like Raised by Wolves. Is it really so bad that the producers decided it was better to let it rot on a shelf than put the completed season out for audiences? We’ll get into that more later. Regardless, Amazon stepped in and rescued the show from the scrap heap, and now all ten episodes are available to stream right now.
Based on the first episode alone, Tell Me Your Secrets appears to be a dark, gritty, character-driven drama that sets out to explore the interconnectedness of a few morally ambiguous characters who are drawn to monstrous predators, or, in the case of one main character, actually is a predator.
Watching the first hour and hearing endlessly about a swamp monster, a serial rapist, a serial killer, and two women who conspire with these monsters, it was easy to see where the original title of the series came from, Deadlier Than the Male comes from the famous Rudyard Kipling poem “The Female of the Species,” and the line, “That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.”