Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 is on the way, and the stakes have never been higher. After Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 4 reveals Bree’s mystery caller, the Hulu drama leaves Bree, Evan, Wrigley, Lucy, and Stephen reeling in both the 2008 college timeline and the 2015 wedding timeline at Baird College.
Episode 5 is titled “I’d Like to Hold Her Head Under Water,” and it arrives on Hulu on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, at 12:00 a.m. ET, which means West Coast viewers can start watching on Monday, January 26 at 9:00 p.m. PT.
According to Hulu’s official synopsis for Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5, gossip will spiral around Lucy at a pool party while Bree seeks answers from her childhood. The episode also picks up the bombshell that Bree’s secret caller was Wrigley, a twist that threatens her marriage to Evan and hands Stephen dangerous new leverage.
Below is everything to know about when Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 drops, how many Tell Me Lies episodes are left in season 3, and how Bree’s caller twist reshapes the story.
Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 release date, time, and episode count
Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5, “I’d Like to Hold Her Head Under Water,” begins streaming on Hulu on Tuesday, January 27, 202,6 at 12:00 a.m. ET, with the episode available on Monday, January 26 at 9:00 p.m. PT for West Coast viewers. That overnight window is the same Tuesday drop time Hulu has used for every episode this season.
Season 3 premiered on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, with a binge-style release of the first three episodes at once. Like season 2 before it, season 3 consists of eight episodes total, with one new installment arriving each Tuesday until the end of the season.
That means Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 marks the start of the back half of the season, with four Tell Me Lies episodes still to go as the fallout from Bree’s phone call and Lucy and Stephen’s toxic connection continues to build.
Because Tell Me Lies is a Hulu original series, you need a Hulu subscription to stream seasons 1 through 3. New subscribers can start with a 30-day free trial on the basic plan with ads, which then costs $10.99 per month after the trial. Hulu’s ad-free tier is priced at $18.99 per month.
If you want more streaming options, Hulu is also included in several Disney+ Bundles. The ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu bundle starts at $12.99 per month, while the top bundle that combines Disney+, Hulu, and Max with no ads costs $32.99 per month.
The episode 5 details come from a release-schedule breakdown published on January 20, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET, which also points viewers to the Tell Me Lies season 3 trailer that teases even more chaos for Lucy and her friends.
Fix Me Up, Girl recap: how Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 4 reveals Bree’s secret caller
Before episode 5, “Fix Me Up, Girl” sets the stage with another time-jumping hour split between 2008 at Baird College and Bree and Evan’s 2015 wedding. Critic Kathleen Walsh gives the episode an editor’s rating of 3 stars and zeroes in on how the show keeps tying messy college decisions to that picture-perfect wedding day.
In 2008, Lucy drifts further away from Stephen DeMarco even as his control intensifies. One of the episode’s standout lines is the bleak observation that “being a woman is a prison,” which lands as Lucy watches another woman struggle with whether to report a predatory professor nicknamed Professor Creep. A Baird RA repeats “my body, my choice” while weighing whether she wants to become one additional victim or keep the peace.
The recap lingers on the way the show uses small details to ground the late-2000s setting. There is an extended bit about a poofy prom hairstyle that seems to require “a minimum of 15 bobby pins” and far more than “ten seconds of background hairstyle” discussion. The episode flashes back to 2009, nods to a Titanic-style couples shoot, and jokes that when you are “20 years old” those romantic poses can feel normal. Walsh even compares some of the sexist chatter to “Joe Rogan in 2026,” noting that misogyny has hardly gone away.
Walsh peppers the recap with hyper-specific pop culture references, from a prom slow dance to “Fade Into You” and comfort rewatches of Gilmore Girls to a joke about needing a Bumpit to pull off that aggressively 2009 poof. It reads like a message to fellow New York Magazine diehards who follow her work across Vulture, Intelligencer, The Cut, The Strategist, Grub Street, Curbed, and the New York Shop, all tucked under the Vox Media umbrella.
Lucy hooks up with Alex, her co-worker at the campus bar, yet she remains caught in Stephen’s orbit and the toxic friend group around Caitie and Chris. Online, background characters whisper about a “Chris Is a Rapist” Facebook group, a detail Walsh calls scarier than any story about “vampires, serial killers, fascist regimes” because it mirrors real-world abuse and complicity. She even weaves in personal anecdotes about friends like Molly and Max to underscore how these dynamics echo real college experiences outside Baird’s walls.
In 2015, the wedding timeline follows Bree’s friend Sadie as she tries to enjoy the party while sensing that something is wrong. Wrigley spends much of the day hanging back, looking shell-shocked instead of celebratory, and the recap imagines his doomed Titanic homage with Bree as the highlight of his entire year. That dissonance between his inner turmoil and Bree’s attempt to move on with Evan makes the eventual phone call reveal even more devastating.
Episode 4 finally answers the question that has been hanging over the series since the season 2 finale: the caller who rang Bree over and over as she got ready for her wedding was Wrigley. The reveal reframes their entire dynamic, from his reckless frat-boy reputation to the tender moments they shared in college, and it crystallizes why he looks so broken in the 2015 scenes.
Cast and character breakdown: Bree, Evan, Wrigley, Lucy, and the creative team
The twist gets unpacked in detail by the cast in an exclusive conversation with TV writer-reporter Julia Moore for People, updated on January 20, 2026, at 04:21 PM EST. Moore, a graduate of Northwestern University who has been working at People since 2022, lets the actors explain how they learned about the secret and what it means for their characters.
Catherine “Cat” Missal, who plays Bree, admits that learning Wrigley was the caller upended her own theories. “It was a shock for everybody,” she says, explaining that when she filmed the original phone scene in season 2, she had no idea who was on the other end of the line. “When we did the phone call scene in season 2, I had no idea who was on the other end of the line,” she recalls, so she imagined possibilities like Oliver, Marianne, or “someone new.”
Missal remembers talking through those possibilities with co-stars and even checking in with creator Meaghan Oppenheimer about whether the mystery man could be Tom Ellis’s character, Oliver, or his onscreen wife, Marianne, who is one of Bree’s professors. At the time, Oppenheimer was firm: “Oh no. No, definitely not.” The truth that the call came from Wrigley, not an older authority figure, shifted the twist in an even messier, more romantic direction.
Spencer House, who plays Wrigley, reveals that he was one of the few people who knew where the storyline was heading. “I was privy to where it was going to go, for most of it,” he explains, noting that he has been aware since the show’s start in 2022 that a deeper romance between Wrigley and Bree was coming. He even points fans back to his very first line in the pilot, delivered to Branden Cook’s Evan: “Go look at the first line of the show,” he says, reminding viewers that Wrigley jokingly tells Evan, “I’m stealing your wife.”
Branden Cook, who plays Evan, describes finding out about the Wrigley twist with a mix of dread and excitement. His first reaction was, “Oh, great, here we go.” However, he quickly embraced the new complications, adding, “It’s interesting. It’s juicy. It was a lot of fun to play.” Evan has loved Bree since their early days together, so having his wife’s secret caller turn out to be his best friend cuts especially deep.
Sonia Mena, who plays Pippa, jokes that the interlocking hookups were almost inevitable in this universe. “At some point, we’ve all got to kiss each other on this show,” she says, likening the romantic chaos to a game of chance: “You’ve got to spin the roulette wheel and see who ends up together.” Her comments underline how the relationships at Baird College keep folding back on each other across the 2008 and 2015 timelines.
Grace Van Patten continues to anchor the series as Lucy, the student whose entanglement with Jackson White’s Stephen DeMarco first set the tone for the show’s most toxic relationship. Tom Ellis brings a sinister charm to Oliver, the charismatic professor whose marriage to Marianne complicates Bree’s sense of safety on campus. All of it stems from Meaghan Oppenheimer’s vision for the series, and the ensemble keeps finding new ways to make familiar college archetypes feel specific. As the cast reminds viewers, new episodes of Tell Me Lies season 3 continue to drop on Hulu every Tuesday.
What Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 could explore next
Looking ahead, the official synopsis for Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 promises that gossip will spiral around Lucy at a pool party while Bree digs into unresolved questions from her childhood. Meaghan Oppenheimer has already teased that Stephen knows who called Bree and that “he’s going to try to create as much damage as possible with that lie, or with that reveal.” Taken together, those hints suggest that Stephen may use the secret to pit Bree, Evan, Wrigley, and Lucy against each other even more.
This is an analysis rather than a confirmed plot, but it seems likely that Evan’s trust in both Bree and Wrigley will keep eroding now that the truth is out. Wrigley’s history of reckless behavior, Bree’s guilt over hiding their past, and Stephen’s ruthless instinct to weaponize information all make episode 5 feel like an emotional powder keg.
With four episodes still remaining in season 3 after “I’d Like to Hold Her Head Under Water,” there is plenty of time for the show to deepen the consequences of Bree’s choice and Lucy’s ongoing attempts to redefine herself. Whether you have been watching since the very first party at Baird College or you just binged the first three installments after they dropped on January 13, 2026, episode 5 looks like a key turning point.
Tell Me Lies season 3 episode 5 will be streaming on Hulu on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, at 12:00 a.m. ET (or Monday, January 26 at 9:00 p.m. PT). Between the reveal that Wrigley was Bree’s secret caller and the cast’s promise of even more “juicy” complications ahead, the next chapter should push every relationship at Baird College to a breaking point.
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