“Never trust a pretty girl with an ugly secret”—My favorable opinion of the new show Pretty Little Liars







ABC Family’s new show Pretty Little Liars premiered last night; actually it aired a surprising three times back-to-back. The new drama features a posse of popular, affluent, pretty high school students dealing with the mysterious disappearance of one of their own. After the unsettling event, the girls grow apart, but reunite after they each start receiving foreboding messages from a mysterious author, “A”, which they believe to be their missing friend Allison. Each eerie text, instant message, note received by the girls contains information that only Allison was privileged to. Each girl receives a message specific to a secret they harbor, threatening revelation of said secret. The episode closes with the funeral of their possibly belated friend. I say ‘possibly belated’ because there is much suspicion that the body in the casket is not Allison’s...After all, how else would one explain the creepy messages?






Each character is a walking cliché.
The typical line-up as seen in the new series:
Spencer is the uptight, studious girl, who inevitably ends up falling for every single one of her older sister’s boyfriends.

Emily is the quintessential jock. She has a secret that hasn’t yet been disclosed. Based on a few alluding statements made by Allison and her sort-of-kiss with the new girl in town, it appears she may currently be struggling with her sexual orientation.

Allison is the missing girl who assumed the role of the bitchy, instigating “queen bee” prior to her disappearance. Think Regina from Mean Girls.

Hanna (former doormat of the estranged group) rises up in the ranks and reintroduces herself as Allison’s replacement as most popular girl in school. Hanna transforms from an awkward pushover into a defiant rebel. She’s resorted to recreational shop-lifting as a way to cope with her family issues.

Aria is melancholy and still deeply upset about her friend's disappearance. First to receive an unusual message, she rounds up her old friends,and discovers that they, too, have been receiving ominous messages from an unknown author. Amidst the controversy, Aria is being pursued by her (recent college grad) English teacher; she is on the fence about the matter. They met under false pretenses, she lead him to believe she was attending college as an english major.

Jenna, what is there to say about Jenna? Well, not much so far, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding this girl. Any mention of this character’s name was in the phrase “the secret about Jenna”. Also, she is blind. Her handicap is made evident when a man escorts her to her seat at the seemingly deceased friend’s funeral.

Despite this predictable set-up, there is something about this show that compels me to keep watching. Pretty Little Liars is entertaining and intriguing, I’m curious to know what will transpire next. What really happened to Allison? What is the “secret about Jenna”? Will a secret relationship between Ari and Ezra (her young teacher) come to fruition? What, if any, repercussions of her shoplifting habit will Hanna incur? So many unanswered questions that need to be addressed.

My take on Pretty Little Liars in a nutshell: dire secrets, complicated characters, forbidden affairs, mysterious murders and “the secret about Jenna”. I’m going to stay tuned and see what other secrets this show has in store!