Midway through the first season of Lie to Me, Prof Paul Ekman is ready to assign grades to the drama he inspired: A-minus for entertainment, B-plus for realism.
Prof Ekman, who is professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco and a social psychologist who works in the area of deception and demeanour, said 85% of what Lie to Me depicted was accurate.
"Baum does care to get it right," he said.
He was speaking of Samuel Baum, who created the show after learning about Prof Ekman's work using facial expressions and verbal tics to help determine whether someone was telling the truth.
"I thought a franchise set around someone who did that kind of work would give real scope to the kinds of cases you could explore - one week a political thriller, one week a family drama," Baum said.
"A little movie every week."
He centred the show on a character named Cal Lightman (played by Tim Roth), an in-your-face investigator who leads a firm that helps law enforcement and government agencies.
The Lightman Group - partner Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams), newcomer Ria Torres (Monica Raymund) and researcher Eli Loker (Brendan Hines) - is typically hired to investigate crimes.
But, occasionally, its clients are people such as a multimillionaire who wants to know whether his fiancee really loves him.
Roth, a veteran movie actor, said he initially wondered how his character should behave.
He watched Prof Ekman, whom he described as calm, and decided to do the opposite.
Roth said he knew little about Prof Ekman's science when he started, and he was trying to avoid learning too much.
But Raymund, whose character is a natural at reading people's expressions, went into the series with a working knowledge of Prof Ekman's studies.
A self-professed "science geek", she'd read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, which discusses Prof Ekman's insights into human behaviour and micro-expressions - those brief, rapid flashes of emotion that communicate what a person is truly feeling.
Baum's intention when he created the series wasn't to teach anyone how to catch a liar - or to instruct them in how to lie better.
Rather, he hoped to present situations where there was a cost to telling a lie as well as to telling the truth.
Initially, he planned to make macro-photography - extreme close-ups of tiny facial movements - an integral part of each show.
But the visual style quickly changed to accommodate the audience, which wanted to try to spot the micro-expressions made by the characters being interrogated.
However, he's kept another feature - images of famous people (a Dick Cheney sneer, a Bill Clinton lip bite) that, when compared with a suspect's expressions, provide context for viewers.
"Some of the science is so mind-blowing, I didn't think people would believe it was real without some of the famous examples," he said.
Baum said he wanted the show to be as realistic as possible.
And it had better be: Prof Ekman, who carries the title of scientific adviser for the show, blogs about each episode at www.fo x.com/blogs/lietome.
He's typically blunt in his assessments.
"I am very glad that the programme acknowledged that you can't always spot lies from demeanour," he wrote after one episode.
"Sometimes, there are no clues in face, body, voice or speech; or even if there are signs in behaviour, you miss them.
"One of my concerns about the Lie to Me series has been that Lightman always caught the liar.
"I don't. I sometimes miss.
"There is no perfect, foolproof way to catch liars, and I bet there never will be." - Marc D. Allan.
