I recently knew someone who claimed he never lied. It was a large part of his personality, but that, in itself, was a lie. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised when I found out, and I honestly don’t know if I was surprised or just hurt. Everyone lies at some point in their life. I assume it’s just part of human nature. We may lie for many reasons, whether it’s a lie for self-preservation, a fib to spare someone’s feelings, or a massive lie just because we can.

Perhaps that’s why so many successful teen drama shows feature storylines where the characters lie and cause trouble. I grew up with some people calling me a liar for simple miscommunications and even a “devil child” for just being a misunderstood kid. Unfortunately, I grew up way earlier than I should’ve. So it makes sense that I was always more interested in watching more mature shows, and little Maddie naturally stumbled upon Pretty Little Liars. I don’t remember whether I started watching it back in 2010 when it first came out or shortly after, but I do remember that it was a staple on our living room box TV when I was a kid.

Pretty Little Liars Was a 2010s Gem

Pretty Little Liars wasn’t just a success in my childhood home but a worldwide phenomenon. The PLL fanbase followed the show from 2010 to 2017, surviving the swap from ABC Family to Freeform and even still going strong. Pretty Little Liars turned into a franchise in 2013 with the first spinoff, Ravenswood, and now features other spinoffs like Original Sin, Summer School, and The Perfectionists.

There are a bunch of ways to gauge a show’s success, and there are even whole companies dedicated to tracking things like that. Most shows get tracked by companies like Nielsen and Parrot Analytics, mainly for TV studios and distributors to know what’s working and what’s not. I don’t know how exactly they collect the data, but I do know that Bluey was the most streamed show of 2024, according to their insights. PLL was part of their highest performer ranked lists just about every year it aired. The show also had nearly nine times the global audience demand for the average American series, which put Pretty Little Liars in the “Outstanding” category for Parrot Analytics. Only about three percent of shows hit that range. Nielsen Ratings also showcased PLL’s success, concluding that the first season alone attracted an average of nearly four million viewers. Similar sources highlight how successful specific finale episodes were, with the summer finale for Season 3 peaking at 70 thousand tweets per minute. Even the series finale four years later performed well, with a little more than a million viewers.

The Plot Was Interesting…But Messy

Back in the day, there wasn’t a “skip intro” option while watching shows, so if a series wasn’t packing a strong intro, things could get boring before it even started. I didn’t have that issue with Pretty Little Liars, as the title sequence is still one of my favorites of all time. The show was alluring, to say the least, as it took typical TV high-school drama to a different level. Instead of teen pregnancies and teenage angst, PLL delivered murder and violent stalking. The show put a clique in the spotlight, following Aria Montgomery, Emily Fields, Spencer Hastings, and Hanna Marin set against the drama of a quaint Pennsylvanian town called Rosewood. It starts in the middle of a stormy night with the four girls getting startled by their best friend Alison DiLaurentis during an end-of-summer slumber party. They start drinking, which quickly leads to them passing out, and when they wake up, Ali is gone. The next scene jumps to the first anniversary of Ali’s disappearance, with all the girls reunited in Rosewood and starting to get anonymous texts alluding to secrets only Ali knew and signed with a simple “A.” They think the messages are coming from Ali herself, but her corpse turns up buried under the gazebo in her old backyard. The pilot ends with the group gathered outside the church after Ali’s funeral and receiving the message, “I’m still here bitches, and I know everything -A,” which sets the tone masterfully.

The story shifts as the girls start trying to figure out who A is and hunt for Ali’s killer. Unfortunately, they’re all on their own, as no adults in town are a safe confidant. The police are totally corrupt, and even if they weren’t, the Liars are all but forbidden from reaching out to anyone else under threat of having their darkest secrets revealed, which would ruin their lives and potentially land them and their loved ones in prison. One of the only things I remember vividly about watching Pretty Little Liars during my childhood was having a notebook dedicated to solving the big mystery. My little sister and I would watch PLL and map out every character we thought could be the enigmatic A. But, the biggest flaw in our system was that we suspected only one person was wearing the black hoodie.

That wasn’t incorrect in the first couple of seasons, but Pretty Little Liars would’ve been a very short show if it ended at the Season 2 finale when Hanna’s best friend, Mona Vanderwaal, was unmasked in a dramatic reveal of A’s motel room lair. Season 3 featured Mona locked up in Radley Sanitarium and diagnosed with a personality disorder, but, of course, A’s game isn’t over. She comes and goes from Radley whenever she pleases, still seemingly running the show, but the girls find out that the black hood came as a set for a team. The A-Team is set up like a pyramid scheme, with Mona just taking up one layer. They find out that Mona has several helpers, including Spencer’s boyfriend, Toby, and Hanna’s friend, Lucas, but they also discover that Mona and everyone else are just pawns for a blonde woman in a red coat.

The girls’ hunt for Red Coat leads them to discover that Ali isn’t actually dead, solidifying their long-running theory pointing toward that fact. Shortly after Ali returns to Rosewood, A sprinkles clues in the Liars’ directions, revealing that Ali has a secret brother, Charles, who’s running the game. The end of the season revealed that Charles DiLaurentis was Charlotte DiLaurentis, who we met early in the show as CeCe Drake. Believe it or not, this reveal was no shock to me, as my sister and I had CeCe’s name written in our notebook and circled within a few episodes of meeting her. I didn’t guess the long-lost sibling part or that CeCe was Charlotte and forced to live as Charles during her childhood, though, as that’s precisely where the story just gets weird for me. It feels like the Charlie storyline was a last-minute idea, almost like the showrunner watched Sleepaway Camp and decided to sprinkle in the same borderline transphobic twist. Worst of all, the series didn’t end there. Season 6 was split into two sections, with 6B featuring a time jump to introduce A.D., the HBIC of the A-Team. Honestly, after the girls go off to college at the end of 6A, the story is done, and everything else is half-baked at best. The final twists that introduced Mary Drake as Jessica DiLaurentis’ twin revealed that Mary was Spencer’s biological mother, and introduced Alex Drake as Spencer’s long-lost twin sister were just too much, even for Pretty Little Liars. The series finale gave the characters a happy ending, but instead of wrapping up loose ends and answering the long-winded questions, it created even more chaos.

The Relationships in PLL Ruin the Charm

Pretty Little Liars has always been one of those shows that I turn to when I need to watch a show I’ve already finished. I’ve rewatched it many times, and unsurprisingly, I’m currently doing just that. I adored PLL as a kid, to the point where I voluntarily read through the 16-book series by Sara Shepard during middle school when Accelerated Reader, or AR, sucked every ounce of joy I got from books out of my soul. I was a little bit past my PLL phase by the time Season 7 came out, but I still watched it, and I still loved it. I went into high school myself shortly after the series finale aired, so other things took its place in my mind and I didn’t watch it for a while. At that point, Pretty Little Liars wasn’t problematic to me. My perspective changed during my second-to-last rewatch.

Not being a kid anymore is complicated, but I can confirm that there isn’t much that’s simpler than knowing the difference between a child and an adult. Similarly, I’m not the best at distinguishing healthy relationships from toxic ones, but I’d argue the average grown-up does. Both seem to be bizarre concepts in PLL. I can only think of two relationships in Pretty Little Liars that aren’t wildly inappropriate or toxic: Spoby and Haleb. The most obvious example of a toxic and problematic TV relationship starts in the pilot episode when a 16-year-old Aria goes to a bar near the local college, Hollis, and meets the recently graduated Ezra Fitz. She implies that she’s in college, and the two hit it off and have a bathroom rendezvous. But during her English class the next day, she discovers that her fling is her new English teacher. Their relationship doesn’t end once Ezra realizes that Aria is not only his student but also a minor. While it shouldn’t have been possible for the situation to get worse, it’s later revealed that Ezra absolutely knew who she was and how old she was when they met. Plus, he dated Ali before she disappeared, and even though she lied about her age, she was around 14 or 15. Unfortunately, dating for several years afterward and getting married doesn’t actually change the fact that Aria was a child, and Ezra knew better. Ian and Alison also had a problematic dynamic, as she was around 15, he was dating Spencer’s older sister Melissa, and he had a habit of recording teenage girls in their bedrooms. In the first season, Melissa’s fiancé, Wren, also liked teenagers, as he made moves on a 16-year-old Spencer.

Age isn’t the only factor working against most of PLL’s relationships, though. Emily and Maya didn’t respect each other during their whole relationship, with Emily treating Maya like she was a criminal because Emily’s mom didn’t approve of their relationship or Maya’s upbringing. Emily and Paige also started horribly, as Paige briefly bullied Emily for her sexuality, even showing pure aggression towards her. Paige also disregarded Emily’s wishes and made her seem like the bad guy on a few occasions. Emily can’t really catch a break, either, as she was in love with Alison before her disappearance, but it was unrequited. Ali knew Emily was gay even when the swimmer wasn’t sure about it herself, and she treated sexuality like ammunition. Ali knew Emily had romantic feelings and encouraged them, only to shoot her down when she acted on them. I really can’t imagine how devastating it would be to have my crush kiss me only to turn around and say it was just practice for kissing boys. Ali had Emily wrapped around her finger and manipulated her feelings, especially before her disappearance. They were also wrapped up in a mess where Emily’s eggs were used to impregnate Ali without her consent. But I will admit that they were a cute couple at the end of the series.

Not even the cops in Rosewood are safe. They’re corrupt, as I mentioned before, and they’re also highly inappropriate. Detective Darren Wilden, for example, used his position as a detective to coerce Hanna’s mom, Ashley, into having a sexual relationship with him under threat of Hanna being arrested for shoplifting. Wilden also harassed the four teenagers during every single episode he was featured in, though that’s nothing new for the Rosewood PD, and Wilden got a fittingly wild death to make up for it. Every officer featured in the show, except for maybe Toby, constantly violated questioning laws and treated the girls like they were criminals for merely existing. Similarly, the police were simply terrible at their jobs throughout the show, as a bunch of kids outsmarted them on numerous occasions. A had it easy throughout Pretty Little Liars. There couldn’t be an easier set of circumstances for a cyberstalker to terrorize kids, as even the most loving parents of the bunch are somewhat blind to even the most obvious lies. And apparently, turning 13 in Rosewood makes you an adult, so it’s only natural for every authority figure to act accordingly. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Pretty Little Liars and its characters. It’s one of the most nostalgic shows that I rewatch. But I can almost guarantee that I wouldn’t vibe with it as much if I watched it for the first time today.