Tell Me Your Secrets is a 2021 Prime Video series focusing on three people and how their lives eventually intersect. Karen Miller (Lily Rabe) is released from prison and put under witness protection and given a new name, Emma, as well as relocated to a small town in Louisiana. Karen was arrested under suspicion of having helped her boyfriend Parker murder dozens of girls— but Karen cannot remember anything about the murders, and has large gaps in her memory regardless. After Parker commits suicide in his cell, Mary Barlow (Amy Brenneman), whose daughter Theresa was last seen on surveillance camera with Parker years ago, becomes obsessed with Karen to find what happened to her daughter, hoping she could still be alive. Mary, through blackmail, recruits John Tyler (Hamish Linklater), a serial rapist who claims to have reformed himself and regret his past actions, to track Karen down and bring her to Mary.
Tell Me Your Secrets contains the following tropes:
- Evil All Along: It is eventually revealed that Theresa actually not only helped Parker with his killing, but killed several herself.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Mary decides to use John to track Karen down specifically because, as a dubiously remorseful former serial rapist, John knows how to track down women who think they’re safe. Mary slowly realizes that by doing so she’s put several women in John’s predatory line of site— and especially when John starts becoming aggressive and obsessive forward Mary herself.
- Foreshadowing: At one point during his incarceration, Parker speaks to the mother of a missing teenage girl, to assure her that she was not one of his victims. During this, he implies that someone "worse than him" was involved in his killings, and asks how it feel to know that "the worst part of is still out there somewhere—" Mary (who watches a recording of this conversation) assumes this as Parker admitting that Karen was an active participant in the murders— despite the fact that Karen herself was incarcerated at this point already, making the "still out there somewhere" comment a bit confusing. It turns out that Parker was talking about his ACTUAL accomplice, Theresa, who WAS roaming around free.
- Hourglass Plot: The series starts with Mary convinced Karen— who was convicted as an accomplice to Parker's murders— was involved in her daughter Theresa's disappearance and recruiting John to track her down. By the end of the series this is turned on its head as it's revealed that Theresa was Parker's actual accomplice all along, and that Theresa had kidnapped Karen's infant daughter immediately after childbirth and the series ends with Karen now on a mission to track her down.
- In Love with the Mark: It’s revealed that Karen was initially targeted by Parker and Theresa to be another victim, until Parker genuinely fell for her and tried to leave Theresa behind.
- Psycho Lesbian: Rose, whose crush on Karen leads her to break into the other's house and, amongst other things, stick her toothbrush in her mouth.
