Pretty Little Liars is a Pretty Little Waste of Time
Recently I started watching season 1 of Pretty Little Liars. I know, I’m eight years late. But when you’re bored on a rainy day and it comes up on netflix, why not binge? Also to be fair, I have seen the show before when it first aired but quickly fell off the wagon because it was hard to keep up when episodes are a week apart and seasons are months apart. Pretty Little Liars, created by I. Marlene King, and based off the book series written by Sara Shepard, is about a group of 5 friends. When one friend, named Allison, disappears mysteriously, the other 4 grow distant. The show starts at the one year anniversary of Allison’s disappearance. All 4 friends return to the same school for their sophomore year of highschool. However when Allison’s body is supposedly found (the funeral casket is closed) the girls are reunited by a mysterious text from “A”. So, Allison’s disappearance drives them apart and her death brings them back together. Each one of the friends, Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna, all have their own separate plotlines that “A” likes to mess with. The girls spend the majority of their time together plotting on how to figure out who “A” is and to find the truth about what happened to Allison. The show takes place in the small town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania where gossip and drama spreads like wildfire.
The first episode contained many plot starters that really weren’t plausible, and this continued over the first season. One for example, would be how Ezra and Aria met. To give some context, Aria is 16, but goes to a bar on the day before school begins. There she meets Ezra and they get together. The next day at school, Aria is sitting in her English class when the teacher walks in and turns out to be who but Ezra Fitz. This is not plausible at all for several reasons. One would be Aria going to a bar by herself as a sixteen year old girl who just got back from a year long trip to a foreign country. The other thing that seems not plausible is that after seeing each other in the classroom, they decide to stay together. Even if Mr. Fitz didn’t know about Aria’s age because, she was in fact in a bar, and she did in fact lie about a few important details about herself, why would a brand new teacher risk his teaching job for a girl he met in a bar the day before? This is extremely unrealistic since they have in fact only known each other for a day. The show however, still makes their forbidden love relationship, super romantic so that any one who continues watching is rooting for it to work besides the fact that he has to be at least 6 years older than her, and it’s illegal.
Besides things being plausible or not, the show has a lot of parts that don’t match up. In season 1, one of Spencer’s love interest’s is named Alex. Although within a few episodes, Alex disappears, and Spencer is onto Toby. There is no explanation what happens to him or between him and Spencer which just leaves the entire thing open ended. Moving on to Toby, his character is very strange. In the beginning of Season 1, Toby is painted as a bad guy in the show. Flashbacks between him and Allison depict him as a pervert and it is widely believed around Rosewood that he was involved in Allison’s death. However, towards the end of season 1, Spencer, who originally despised and distrusted him the most, develops feelings for him when they bond over stalking Jenna. Within the first season Toby is flipped from being the good guy, to the bad guy, to the framed good guy who is innocent and deserves all of the viewers’ sympathy. This inconsistency makes the plot jumbled and confusing. This inconsistency doesn’t just go among characters. In a string of episodes toward the end of season one, there is a school play that Mr. Fitz aka Ezra is directing, and of course Aria takes the role as the director’s assistant. The main purpose of adding this into the show is to create tension between Aria and Ezra as she continually slips up with keeping their secret relationship. However, nothing is ever said about the play, or what happens with it. In one episode it just is never mentioned again.
The biggest problem with the plot of the show is how the entire thing is handled by the girls. Instead of contacting the police, or telling their parents that someone is stealing their things, contacting them anonymously through the name “A” and framing them, they instead take these serious matters into their own hands, as 15 and 16 year old girls. Realistically, high school sophomores would not be staying in motel rooms overnight to stalk a blind girl, or be able to hide the fact that someone broke into their house from their parents. The show gets away with this however because the actresses are and look much older and act more mature than actual high school sophomores.
The acting on the show isn’t terrible but isn’t phenomenal either. Some scenes are realistic, however in the more intense scenes where the suspense is built to a peak, the acting falls short. The screams and cries are cringey and all four actresses are unable to really express being upset and actually in a crises.
The one thing the show does do is effectively show it's theme. The show does it so well that theme almost slaps you in the face with every episode. Since the beginning of the show the theme has been that secrets are dangerous to keep and to have. Literally EVERYONE in the show has secrets and in someone time or way they find a way to hurt themselves or another character in the show. The girls themselves even talk about how Allison always talked about keeping each others secrets and how it is now hurting them since things have become much more serious.
To summarize, if you’re looking for some realistic and moving, this show is not for you. However, if you find cheesy dramas amusing like me, you’ll find yourself watching episode after episode.
5 Best ABCFamily drama series (no particular order)
- Pretty Little Liars
- Switched at Birth
- The Secret Life of an American Teenager
- The Fosters
- Recovery Road
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