[Source: AP News]

Dramatizing toxic relationships can be tricky, just ask the filmmakers and cast of “It Ends With Us.” While the movie about a woman who falls in love with a man who abuses her has been a box office success, it prompted discourse about whether it glorified domestic violence.

The Hulu series “Tell Me Lies,” now streaming its second season, is about an again-off again relationship between Lucy and Stephen (Grace Van Patten and Jackson White). Their relationship isn’t physically abusive, but it is unhealthy.

Meaghan Oppenheimer, executive producer and showrunner, says she’s very mindful of respecting the weight of early relationships on a person’s life.

In “Tell Me Lies,’’ she also wanted to tap into how people sometimes romanticize unhealthy relationships, justifying that the harder they are to maintain, the stronger the connection.

“As you mature, hopefully, you realize happiness is the most exciting thing. The back-and-forth relationships, the on-and-off, they’re boring because they follow the same cycle, and there’s never any actual growth,” she said.

We’ve all known someone like Lucy, have been Lucy, or even Stephen, says Oppenheimer.

Van Patten says she “can relate” to Lucy’s clouded judgment regarding Stephen.

This season, Lucy and Stephen spend a lot of energy trying to make the other miserable. Van Patten and White are dating in real life, and Van Patten says the shift to their on-screen personas “was really fun.”

Van Patten says they would apologize after a particularly cruel take.

The new season introduces another unhealthy relationship — Lucy’s friend Bree (Catherine Missal) and the husband of a professor, played by Tom Ellis (“Lucifer”). Ellis is married to Oppenheimer.

Ellis says the role took its toll, but the couple’s baby daughter, Dolly, helped pull him out.

When it comes to the characters, it’s more difficult to write Lucy than Stephen, said Oppenheimer.

Besides, Oppenheimer enjoys writing about the messiness in relationships.