User reviews

People say this show has a lot of sex, slurs ... who cares? This show is pure Showtime, so, if you like Californication, you will like House of Lies. If you like Downtown Abbey, maybe you will not. Another reason to watch this show is the cast. Don Cheadle is a great actor, and having the possibility of watching him in this kind of show is awesome. No more "Hotel for Dogs", Don. And Kristen Bell. Everyone loves Kristen Bell. Natural beauty and great actress. Can't wait to see if both characters end up having some kind of relationship ( aka sex ) We'll see how the plot resumes, but the groundwork is done. Showtime is back. The sex, the slurs are back. Who cares?

I'd say the show deserves to stay on air and in the lineup with all of the other Showtime shows. Upon reading other reviews, I realized certain ridiculous things that were being said about the show. What's the name of the show? Oh yeah, "House of Lies", so of course it isn't "Californication". There are several things that are labeled as a comedy that we actually would not agree with. Comedy, in it's original definition, means a story in which the main character(s) end up better off, ultimately. It didn't always mean a show or movie that will make you laugh. Regardless, I do end up laughing especially when Don Cheadle's character starts describing things to the audience while time freezes, the ridiculous banter between Schwartz and Lawson's characters, as well as Kristen Bell's sarcasm. Going along again with the debate of the term "Comedy" and the comparison of this show with other shows that exist, on HBO the show "Entourage" was considered a Comedy. That show made me laugh even less, yet I still enjoyed it. It wasn't busting-at-the-seams funny. So, let's stop being so ridiculous and just ENJOY a show for what it is instead of having expectations of what other show it should be like.

This has to be one of the most lewd and rude shows I have ever seen. Push that aside for a tick and discount the machine gun humour that's leaving gaping holes across the corporate back drop in which this is set. Move to the foreground to where I want to dwell. The great mix of self absorbed characters with more hang ups than a normal closet. A dollop of kid dealing with coming out of a closet, or is that his dad and dad's dad that are dealing with it? Those two generations of fathers are definitely not sure how to do the job. Only seen two episodes but I am hooked, line and sinker. Sprinkle the whole thing with a reasonably good support cast. Greg Germann was so good in Episode one, good to see a reprise in next weeks. Kristen Bell is OK as is Ben Swatz & Josh Lawson in full geek mode.

But what is with the on again off relationship with Don Cheddie and Dawn Olivieri who plays his hot ex? Gold, pure gold! This is one of those multi layered comedies that I look for from the UK.

Bravo ShoTime for making, what is at present, my new favourite TV show. Keep it strong!

I just read a review in which someone complained about the amount of "slurs" and basically equated the show to pornography. They couldn't be more wrong.

Yes, the show has some swears. And yes, there is nudity. But how is that worth a 1-star review? Are you 10 years old? This is a program created by and for Showcase, a network that shamelessly brands itself as "television without borders," so there should be an expectation of some level of debauchery. How many other top shows out there contain the same material? Look at True Blood, Game of Thrones, Californication, and the list goes on. House of Lies is an adult show with adult themes. Get the hell over it! This show is clearly not for you. Everyone's welcome to their own opinion but I doubt anyone will find yours to be useful here. Don't give it a 1-star review just because you don't approve of its content. Go watch "The Wind at My Back" or something like that instead.

That being said, Don Cheadle is fantastic as the lead part in this comedy. He pulls it off so well that it's unexpected and refreshing. Cheadle's "psycho" ex-wife is also a great character, flipping between pill-popping party girl and smart, driven career woman that we love to laugh with even though we hate her for being such a b*tch. I can't wait to see more of this show and I applaud everyone involved for a job well done. The acting is convincing and the writing is sharp. There is a great dynamic between all the characters, especially that of Cheadle and his father. The only acting that's less-than stellar comes from Cheadle's son's character, but it's difficult to find a convincing child actor anywhere. He'll probably improve as the show goes on.

I was laughing throughout the episode. Don't let the review of some prude turn you away from this great comedy.

Whom ever suggested that porn is better must not watch porn at all. As an adult I am tired of having television shows watered down to please those who are afraid of adult content. I love the savvy business talk,the fact that the consultants do what they have to do to get what they want. We all know that that's not the real world but it's a TV show. The banter is brilliant and the humor is memorable. Don Cheadel's character is so unapologetically ruthless that you can't help but like him. A welcome break from mindless reality shows. This now my favorite Showtime Series. The only reason I gave it a 9 and not a 10 is because I wish it were an hour long.

I never ever write reviews and honestly this will be my first ever review for a movie or TV show in my entire life lol, that being said I can't even begin to understand why this show is rated so low. This show is the most entertaining show I have seen since "office", plus it has all the adult themes that you wished was displayed in "Office". No its not a work of art of some yuppy's view of how great television is supposed to be but wow this is just that perfect show for the normal person who still has some sort of pulse left in his veins. I can understand how the older generation would not enjoy this show but it truly is just great mindless fun to watch and enjoy. Once again I never wrote a review before in my life but I just had to after seeing such low ratings, I really hope they don't cancel this show like all the other great shows that was low rated because people are just too uptight in their ideas of proper television. IDK maybe because I don't have grey hair yet or don't pretend to be sitting in a directors chair that I don't understand such low rating. Anyway if you take a regular guys advice, try this show cause it really is the most under rated comedy out there.

The pilot of "House of Lies" showcased a funny, stylish, and fast-paced dramedy focused on the world of big business. Don Cheadle plays Marty Kaan, a fast-talking, self-loathing, consultant trying to balance his broken home life with his high-powered job. His father is a liberal psychologist and his ex-wife is his mirror image(who works for a rival consulting firm.) The pilot reveals a lot of reasons for his self- loathing nature and sets him up a lot of character development later on. Kristen Bell plays Jeannie Van Der Hooven, the smart, tough, and somewhat mysterious second-in-command to Cheadle. She doesn't have a ton of screen time in the pilot, which is obviously a mistake when you're talking about Kristen Bell. Really hoping that more is revealed about her later. The rest of the cast is passable but not memorable.

The plot of the pilot is centered on the consulting team trying to retain a big client. The competing firm is lead by Marty's ex-wife. The forth wall is frequently broken for Cheadle to explain some consulting jargon to the audience. It works pretty well and flows with the overall fastness of the show. There are also some showy quick cuts for travel and non-essential scenes which add a bit of style. There is also sex and nudity peppered throughout the entire half hour. Id say 7 minutes don't go by without some sort of sex. The sex lends to the overall feel of the show, but may be overdone.

Overall, House of Lies shows a lot of promise, or at least enough to keep me watching

First off, I have to say I don't watch a lot of "TV". But by TV I mean regular shows or sitcom type material (if they still call it that). I watch movies or sports, news, etc...

But I saw the trailer for this and thought it looked great so I watched it. Now I just love it. It's raunchy and something you're embarrassed to watch with your adult kids, but it's still utterly hysterical. Cheadle makes the whole thing go - but Kristen Bell is excellent as she shows some business savvy with the comedy as well. The other two...well, they are kind of straight men so that's okay. I can watch the same episode three or four times and still laugh and enjoy it.

Personally I think Cheadle is one of the best and most underrated actors around. He should be more of a feature star than doing a cable show, but I'm thrilled he's doing this.

Having said all that, I'm in business. Not Management Consulting, but on the other side, and heaven knows I have encountered their types and typically loathe them. Maybe that's why I find this so funny. If you have no business background, I still think it'll be funny for you, but being in the corporate world makes you laugh that much harder.

Excellent...just excellent.

What started out as a scathing, hilarious indictment of the management consulting racket within just a few episodes has unfortunately turned into a heart-warming/-wrenching story about dysfunctional family life and damaged people.

Even the remnant veneer of business-side stories are beginning to cast the consultants as good guys, working hard to save troubled businesses rather than the leaches and scum of the original premise.

Also, very regrettably the show falls for the false premise that gender-bending is automatically funny and risqué. In fact for those to be funny they have to be, well, funny, as opposed to simply slapped in with a teenage breathlessness about how cool they are.

Incredible fun all around, surprised I didn't watch sooner! Delightful cast throughout that do business stuff, fool around, and get things done. I love the dialogue quite well written and the parts Don Cheadle breaks the 4th are greatness! I'm gonna enjoy binging House of Lies.

When I looked at the IMDb reviews for this title, I saw the weirdest bunch of reviews of any title I had seen. Most people had heaped praises on the show and those who didn't, I could safely classify as prudes. I decided to watch the show and as a non-prude, I was not completely impressed.

The good things first of course. Everyone cast here is amazing. They lend great depth to their characters and pull off great performances. Don Cheadle is given the meatiest role here and he pulls off humorous cynic and depressed egotist with panache. His scenes with the breaking of the 4th wall are done really well. It was only in the pilot episode that I felt it was a tad overdone. Certain scenes when he holds a conversation and slips in single words to the viewer keep you interested amidst all the business jargon and keep you entertained. The business lingo is still kept to a reasonable level with most of the dialogue being banter or 4th wall shattering stuff. This is good since we can't have all those numbers clouding the experience for the uneducated.

Now the not-so-good things. People have rebuked the amount of sex in this which is incredibly foolish considering this is a Showtime feature. But I did feel that the sex, though few and far between, is sometimes stretched beyond the comic threshold. And at these times, it's not pretty. Sex jokes only get you so far. The show also treats most other businessmen either like complete morons or shrewd underhanded jackals. The show bathes in the stereotypes set by the populace and doesn't ever seem to want to show some of the truth in how people actually do business. They mostly seem to want to concentrate on humour and Marty Kahn's character but using clichéd business as a backdrop. This in itself is clichéd and this disappointed me greatly.

But on the whole, going simply by the intelligent humour, this is a great watch though taking this show seriously would not be recommended.

This is a fantastic show. It's caustic but it also has heart. The cast is excellent - Don Cheadle is amazing and the rest of the cast plays off him really well. DC is able to project so much just with a look or a gesture at times. The show is also refreshingly NOT dumbed down. They don't feel the need to explain everything - the viewer is treated as a reasonably intelligent person who is able to put two and two together. Hope the show never loses that! If you are new to it I suggest you start with the excellent pilot and watch through the series sequentially. It really is a serialized dramedy in my opinion, so you get to watch the plots and relationships evolve over time. This has become one of my favourite shows of all time.

Sex, laughs, intrigue, rivalries, nudity, this show has a lot going for it. I enjoyed the intricacies of the business world and the playful banter and pranks between coworkers. The only criticism I have about this show is that I did not care for the pause scenes where Don Cheadle directly speaks to the camera. When one of these scenes is executed everyone around Cheadle plays red light, essentially standing still while he talks. There are a couple of these scenes where they used obvious CG to freeze the rest of the room. There are just too many ways to execute type of scene(see House of Cards) This show could be great if they cut out the freeze scenes.

House Of Lies is a fun, refreshing, TV series. I started watching the 2nd season and had to catch up by buying the first season. The writing is smart, silly, serious and comedic and the actors do a really great job, really good casting. Shotime seems to have the best T.V. Shows on premium cable television in my opinion and House Of Lies is definitely one of them. I'm looking forward to watching the 3rd season and seeing what fun drama Marty Kann and his team get themselves into and how they talk themselves out it and still seal the deal LOL. The House Of Lies casting directors made a really good move when they brought Nia Long's sexy self into the show. I love how Marty, Monica and the rest of their family and friends love and respect their son Roscoe's life choice even though they may not agree with it. Over all House Of Lies is a smart well written and acted TV show.

Not every show is for everyone and having a negative review can help someone else who's not into the same thing. What are you, 10 years old? Grow up, and let everyone have their view WITHOUT attacking them for it. I usually like Canadians. I am making an exception to this in Hannah's case because some apparently do suck.

My review of Hannah's review of someone else's review = 1/10.

Show is abrasive but funny.

Don Cheadle is funny. Good cast.

Showtime is definitely into pushing the envelope and has done so here. Sometimes too abrasive but still a good show.

This is a great show for young adults and in particular young men. To me it is Californication with a little more whit. Cheadle is perfect for the role; making the viewer really believe he can make any deal happen with his quick tongue and confident demeanor(he plays a consultant for the number two ranked company if you didn't already know).Each show consists of him and his team trying to make one deal happen and then generally shows Cheadle returning to his family life in the end. Not sure why it isn't more highly rated, but I give it an 8. If you enjoy the playboy type role that Duchovny plays in Californication you will love Cheadle in House of Lies!

I found this show on Amazon Prime and decided to give it a watch because I have a huge crush on Kristen Bell. Yeah, I know. Sue me. Anyway, I binged all 5 seasons in about a week, so I'm reviewing the entire show, pilot to finale. All my commentary will remain general, so no spoilers ahead.

Overall, I have to say I don't think the show is worth watching, even if you're a big fan of one of the actors or some other specific element that went into it.

The show does occasionally have its moments. Once in a while, but generally not more than once a season, there is something to really get excited about, something that will stir some emotion if you're invested in the characters and story. Sadly, none of those moments are quite grand enough to make it worth the grind of reaching them. And it is a grind.

For starters, it's hard to really root for any of the characters. I've seen plenty of shows/movies where you're "rooting for the bad guy," which is sort of the premise this show was going with- a bunch of management consultants whose job it is to trick corporations into paying them ridiculous amounts of money. Okay, no problem there. Except that they're not just bad guys in business. They're constantly backstabbing, back-biting, and generally treating everyone around them (including each other) terribly. And if we weren't supposed to like the characters, that MIGHT be okay. But then we're given all these subplots and interactions that are clearly designed to make us feel for and relate to the characters. And just when you're getting to like them, they turn around and do something horrible again. It's a bit like a very unpleasant roller coaster.

Part of that, the very worst part, are the 'false growth' moments. The show will give you some sequence of events that seems to lead one of the characters to grow and change, and then a couple episodes later (if it even lasts that long) they revert right back to who they were in the pilot. After a while it gets hard to watch the same characters doing the same things without ever growing, learning, or changing.

This is especially pronounced with the "sidekick" characters played by Ben Schwartz and Josh Lawson. They're more caricatures than characters, and every time they seem to start turning into real people, the show pulls a 180 and they're right back where they started.

I'm not going to say much about the acting except that I didn't think anyone spoiled it with their performance, but likewise the only one that really impressed me was Glynn Turman, who plays Don Cheadle's character's father and pops up pretty regularly throughout the show without being one of its leads. He steals virtually every scene he's in, but part of that may be that he's the only truly likable character in the show.

House of Lies rarely lacks for unpredictable twists and surprises, but by the end even that starts to become predictable. Once you get a good feel for the show you can actually predict when the next twist will pop off, and what sort of character it will have (blow to personal life, blow to the business, etc.) without having any clue what form it will take.

Even if you don't know the first thing about corporate America, the show requires a ridiculous amount of suspension of disbelief. The team deals almost exclusively with powerful CEOs, Board Members, and other titans of industry who are, one and all, half-wit fools and cowards. They are all just bumbling around, doing obviously stupid things, waiting for the team to arrive and trick them with the most childishly obvious ploys and strategies imaginable, treating each one as if its an act of sheer brilliance. I'm sure the writers like to imagine that everyone who goes into business is an idiot because it fits with Hollywood's preferred narrative about capitalism, corporations, 'rich white men', etc. but it's really quite ridiculous, especially given how big a part of the show it encompasses.

And speaking of narratives, strap in for some seriously preachy story lines, because you're going to get force-fed a lot of the usual Progressive talking points in the process of watching this show, and House of Lies doesn't do subtle. So you'll see Don Cheadle deal with over-the-top racism, and Kristen Bell with over-the-top sexism. Then you'll see the obvious knock-offs of real people the show wants to mock by presenting them as caricatures with slightly altered names. And if anyone brings up religion, you don't even have to think about it, because they're all fools, hypocrites, and bigots. Cap it all off with a portrayal of the brutal dictatorship in Cuba as some kind of paradise on Earth and... well, you get the idea.

My final note will touch on the series finale, but without any spoilers. The entire final season feels like it's building to a logical ending business-wise, as if they were planning to end the show at the end of season 5. But for some reason they don't take any steps at all to set the characters' personal lives on a matching trajectory, so we roll into the final episode with nothing close to resolved for anyone, and then suddenly the characters just turn themselves inside out to give the ending we've all been waiting for, which I found completely unsatisfying.

Anyway, I hope this review helps. I really wanted to enjoy the show, and you can't say I didn't give it a fair shake, but they just didn't make something worth the time.

Don Cheadle is excellent in this comedic drama. House of Lies keeps you on edge. Once you start watching it, you will beg for more. The writing is excellent. I can't wait for the new season. Cheadle definitely deserves and Emmy for his role. The other cast members are perfectly fitted into the plot and with each week, the plot thickens. I also truly love the child who plays Cheadle's son. He is a great little actor and brings an interesting dynamic to the show. At first, I was Leary about Kristen Bell. I was unsure if she penetrate her "girl-next door" image, but she certainly surprised me. House of Lies is full of comedy, drama, and sexuality. It is not for kids. House of Lies is my favorite!!

This show is great. The only ppl who don't like it are sensitive cuz they have a similar job and can't take a joke . Or somone who is worried about PC. None of those ppl deserve this show anyway.