Television has something for everyone. Whether your style is mindless, trashy sitcoms or massive-budget ornate fantasy dramas, rest assured your hunger will be sated. However, one genre of TV reigns supreme: 2010s teen dramas. It’s messy. It’s dramatic. It’s hilarious. In the case of the best 2010s teen drama show, it can even be a bit scary. That’s right, we’re going to do a much-needed analysis of what I would call the most iconic TV show ever: “Pretty Little Liars.”
“Pretty Little Liars,” created by I. Marlene King, is set in the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania. The pilot episode, which aired in 2010, introduces four main characters: Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario, “Doula”), Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale, “The Hating Game”), Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson, “Spring Breakers”) and Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell, “You”). The four girls are reeling from the sudden disappearance of their fifth friend and queen bee, Alison DiLaurentis (Sasha Pieterse, “Inherent Vice”) when they begin to receive messages from a mysterious figure named “A” who threatens to reveal the group’s darkest secrets. For the purposes of this analysis, I have conducted extensive research (which included rewatching some of the highest-rated episodes and rewatching this work of art), and I have opted to divide elements of the show into two categories: brilliant and unhinged. Let’s begin with unhinged.
The sheer length of “Pretty Little Liars” can be considered unhinged in itself. The show is composed of seven seasons with roughly 25 episodes per season, amounting to a grand total of 160 episodes. Having such bloated seasons allowed for deeper storytelling but also opened the door for massive plot holes and convoluted storylines that sometimes didn’t make sense. Especially in early seasons, characters saw ominous figures in windows and possible suspects in cars and had a run-in with someone they thought was “A,” but upon the grand reveal, none of these plot points were properly explained. When watching this series closely, there are clear points when the writers weren’t sure which direction the show would go, but maybe that’s the point — “Pretty Little Liars” isn’t meant to be watched closely.
Moving on to possibly the most unhinged aspect of this show: the relationships. “Pretty Little Liars” aired during the rise of social media, which meant that as the show progressed, fans could easily tune in and voice their opinions on Twitter or Instagram. In an effort to keep fans happy, King had every incentive to deviate from the books on which the series was based in order to maintain the fan favorite “ships.” Were these “ships” worth keeping around?
Let’s take a look at one of the show’s most hyped couples: Aria and Ezra (Ian Harding, “Pale Blue), “ship” name “Ezria.” When you get a glimpse of Hale and Harding together at the beginning of the show, there seem to be no issues. Hale and Harding have great on-screen chemistry and the tension is palpable. All’s well until you realize that in the pilot episode, Hale was playing a 16-year-old sophomore in high school, and Harding was playing her 23-year-old English teacher. Don’t clutch your pearls just yet, because “Ezria” is not the show’s only disturbing couple.
Throughout the series, viewers were introduced to far too many questionable affairs: 16-year-old Spencer with 23-year-old Wren (Julian Morris, “New Girl”), 14-year-old Alison with 23-year-old Ian (Ryan Merriman, “Backwoods”) and too many more. If you’re anything like me, you didn’t pay much attention to the awful age gaps in these relationships until after the first viewing, an example of a problem notorious in teen dramas — casting. Hale, Mitchell, Bellisario and Benson were without a doubt the best at playing their respective characters, but it was unbelievable to have them playing 16-year-olds when they were as old as 24. When these women were paired with actors their age, the couples are unassuming and even attractive together. But take into account the characters’ ages and you quickly realize that Ezra should not have been allowed to walk around like this amongst his students; he should have been in jail. The issue of 25-year-olds playing 16-year-olds who act like 30-year-olds is prevalent in other popular teen dramas like “Gossip Girl,” an issue made worse when you consider the audience of these shows was when they were first airing. I was 12 when I started watching “Pretty Little Liars,” as were most of my friends. To be told that high schoolers looked like the people in “Pretty Little Liars” and that an ongoing relationship with your English teacher was totally cool is nothing short of unhinged.
Now, we move into the brilliant category. Some things listed here can also fall under the “unhinged” section, but let’s be honest — the most brilliant aspects of 2010s TV are always unhinged. Let’s begin with the characters. If we ignore their canonical ages discussed earlier, the actual personalities and behaviors of most of the series’s main characters are the definition of brilliant. More specifically, the “villain” characters are what make “Pretty Little Liars.” Some of the best-written characters are also the most diabolical in this show, which is what makes you want to laugh, scream and cover your eyes all at the same time. Take, for example, Jenna Marshall (Tammin Sursok, “Rules of Engagement”) and Melissa Hastings (Torrey DeVitto, “Chicago Med”). Jenna was a victim of one of Alison’s maniacal pranks, which caused her to lose her vision, and she will stop at nothing to get her revenge — including having an affair with a cop to frame the girls for murder (add this to the list of disturbing relationships). Melissa is Spencer’s older sister and makes it abundantly clear that she is not only the smartest person in Rosewood, but she’s also not above threatening her own family to get what she wants.
Both Jenna and Melissa (along with a horde of other Rosewood residents) are suspected of being “A” at points throughout the show, but this list of wonderful villains wouldn’t be complete without the girl who actually was “A” in the first two seasons — Mona Vanderwaal (Janel Parrish, “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”). Now, Mona is a capital “T” threat. Over the course of the first two seasons, she hit Hanna with a car, poisoned Emily, sent Spencer to the sanitarium and threatened to reveal Aria’s family secrets. And she looked good doing it. What makes characters like Jenna, Melissa and Mona brilliant is just how messy they are. There is absolutely no end to their obsession with “the game,” and they will stop at nothing to win it. It makes for good storytelling, and it brings us historic artifacts like these.
Last but definitely not least, we have the plot. Yes, as mentioned before, the plot is extremely convoluted and the show definitely could have done with fewer episodes per season, but certain episodes were too good plot-wise to overlook. A couple of standout examples are the Halloween train and dollhouse episodes.
It’s a universally accepted fact that no one does Halloween episodes like “Pretty Little Liars” — they even revamped the intro sequences. Season 3 Episode 13 is titled “This Is a Dark Ride” and it takes place during the Halloween of 2012, set during a costume party on a moving train. The costumes are iconic, Adam Lambert is there and, of course, “A” couldn’t miss the party. While this series may be comical and dramatic, horror is one of its strongest suits. This episode proves that by featuring multiple masked criminals, Aria’s terrifying near-death experience, a big character death and a very big Alison-related discovery.
The season five finale and season six premiere are collectively known as the “dollhouse” episodes and are the first and second top-rated episodes of “Pretty Little Liars” on IMDb, respectively. The four main girls have been kidnapped by “A” on their way to prison (remember when I said this show was unhinged?) and are now trapped in a real-life dollhouse, complete with exact replicas of their rooms and living rooms. This new version of “A” is not above psychological torture experiments, and it’s up to the girls to outsmart their long-time foe and escape. The dollhouse episodes represent the series’s progression toward darker material over the seasons. It seemed like, as the show’s target audience aged up, the content aged with it. At age 12, I was watching the girls get weird texts and creepy packages. At age 15, I was watching Spencer wake up covered in “blood” and made to think that she killed someone while blacked out. King, hats off to you.
There are — as is always the case with media from this era — things that ring problematic. The relationships, for one, but the handling of the discourse around mental health was also crass. The patients at Radley sanitarium were always held at arm’s length, and Mona’s mental illness was often brushed off while she got slapped with the label “Crazy Mona.” These issues aside, “Pretty Little Liars” has cemented itself as one of the most iconic television shows of our time. The characters in the show each harbored their own secrets and insecurities, and the show made it a point to let us know that they would go to the ends of the earth to protect them. Whether that involves sabotage, blackmail or straight-up murder, “A” could make you do things you have never even dreamed of. In keeping up with the characters and the plot for six years, the viewer became an unwitting player in the game — an element of the show that has led to many, many interesting fan theories. With a new character taking on the mantle of “A” every few seasons, Rosewood was just a revolving door of suspects, keeping every viewer on their toes. So the next time you get an odd text from an unknown number, remember to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Because two can only keep a secret if one of them is dead.
Kisses,
-S.
Daily Arts Writer Swara Ramaswamy can be reached at swararam@umich.edu.