Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Desperate Lies’ On Netflix, Where A Woman Is Impregnated By Two Different Men Who Despise Each Other

Soapy shows that have really dark moments — that don’t treat the darkness as camp — are few and far between, because it’s really hard to pull that off. A new Netflix series from Brazil is both soapy and dark, almost to the point of being grim.

DESPERATE LIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “2006.” We see a house at night and the sounds of a woman in labor.

The Gist: The woman, Liana (Juliana Paes) walks away from her husband Tomás (Vladimir Brichta), and goes to a work shed to be alone. Tomás finds her and helps her give birth to their son. As he’s putting the newborn in his crib, Liana screams “The other one is coming!”

Flash back eight months. Liana, who has had a couple of miscarriages, is taking medication to help her with ovulation, but hasn’t told Tomás. Knowing that she’ll be ovulating that day, she comes home from work and has some quick, perfunctory baby-making sex with her husband.

Afterwards, as she has her legs up to help along his sperm, she sees a flirty text on his phone from Claudia (Yohama Eshima), a woman in the bicycling group they both used to be in; she then sees an even sexier email from her. Liana confronts Tomás about it and he blames her for making their marriage all about making a baby. He decides to go on a biking trip to get some space.

The next day, she commiserates with her work friend Débora (Martha Nowill). Débora’s solution is to go to the club where her brother Oscar (Felipe Abib) bartends. Oscar admits that he’s always had a crush on Liana and says that Tomás doesn’t deserve her. They proceed to get drunk and pop some Ecstasy. They go back to her place, and she tries to fend off Oscar’s advances, but he ends up taking advantage of her when she was largely unconscious, which she realizes the next morning when she sees a condom wrapper on the floor.

Tomás ends up going to the hospital, the victim of a biking accident, and he tells his doctor sister Silvia (Paloma Duarte) not to tell Liana. In the meantime, Oscar, who was a close friend of Liana’s brother, who died about a decade prior, tries to romance her and ultimately tells her that he threw the condom to the floor before he even used it, meaning he was unprotected when he had sex with her.

Eventually, Silvia tells Liana about Tomás and they reconcile. Tomás is overjoyed when Liana finds out she’s pregnant, but she wants to know exactly how far along she is; she is understandably concerned that the child isn’t her husband’s. She finds out she is having twins, and after taking a paternity test, gets the shock of her life: One of the fetuses is Tomás’, and the other is Oscar’s.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Desperate Lies (Original title: Pedaço de Mim, created by Ângela Chaves, feels like a telenovela along the lines of Jane The Virgin, except way, way darker in tone.

Our Take: The first hour of Desperate Lies is certainly a rough watch, but not just because of the grim circumstances surrounding Liana’s pregnancy. Essentially, she was sexually assaulted by Oscar, and because of the million-to-one result that she was impregnated by both Oscar and Tomás, there’s no way she can terminate the pregnancy. The rest of the season (a voluminous 17 episodes!) basically revolves around how Liana manages this turn of events and how both Tomás and Oscar react when they learn the truth.

Like we said, though, that’s not the only reason why the show is so hard to watch. There are a ton of interconnections and silly coincidences thrown into the mix that we hope will link into the main story later on but seem strangely superfluous in the first episode.

For instance, Silvia seems to be the only doctor in all of Rio de Janeiro; she’s not only Liana’s OB-GYN, but she’s also there when Tomás arrives in the ER after his accident. Oh, and by the way, Silvia and her son go to Liana’s clinic so her son can learn to live independently with his failing vision.

Then there’s the business of Liana’s brother’s death, which Oscar seems to have regrets about ever since. Right after Liana’s unfortunate night with Oscar, her mother decides to invite Oscar and Débora to her house for her yearly, maudlin birthday celebration for her dead son. This is where Oscar tells Liana about throwing the condom away. It’s the type of coincidence that only seems to happen on soapy shows like this, even ones with really dark themes.

This doesn’t feel like the kind of story that could occupy 17 episodes unless there are a lot of side plots thrown in the mix. But the problem with having those side plots is that, unless they’re expertly written, they’ll only serve to distract from the main plot, which is that Liana is having two children fathered by two men who despise each other. Your enjoyment will depend on whether you’re into all of these side plots or not.

Sex and Skin: There’s simulated sex but not a lot of nudity in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Liana receives the shocking news about being impregnated by two different men.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Felipe Abib, because he personifies Oscar’s scumbaginess perfectly.

Most Pilot-y Line: Just the overall feeling that, in 2024, a drama that victim-blames a woman that was sexually assaulted feels really, really wrong, and that’s the vibe we get from the aftermath of Oscar’s assault.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Desperate Lies isn’t just grim and filled with side stories that seem to distract from the main one, but its viewpoint is extremely retrograde, whether that was the intention or not.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.