Pretty Little Liars Review

 Hello everyone! So I finished watching Pretty Little Liars, and I decided to write a review of it. 

So, let's start off with a quick summary. 

Four friends band together against an anonymous foe who threatens to reveal their darkest secrets, while also investigating the disappearance of their best friends.

Pretty Little Liars was created by I. Marlene King [and based on the books by Sara Shepard], and stars Troian Bellisario, Ashley Benson, Lucy Hale, Shay Mitchell, Ian Harding, Keegan Allen, Sasha Pieterse, Janel Parrish, Bianca Lawson, Laura Leighton, Holly Marie Combs, Tyler Blackburn and Lindsey Shaw. 

My Thoughts: So, obviously, I'm very late to watching this show. XD [if you're curious, it ran from 2010 to 2017]. Overall, I'm really glad I watched it, even though there are a lot of issues with it. 

So, I'm going to be discussing the pros and cons of the show, and then I'll discuss the characters.

Oh! And spoiler alert, obviously. 

The pros

-First of all, can I just say props to all the actors? All of them fit their roles so well, and they really do the best with the script, even if it's bad. Special mention to Troian Bellisario [Spencer], Janel Parrish [Mona] and Sasha Pieterse [Alison].

-I think that the plot in the early seasons is pretty good [well, for the most part. There are some plot holes here and there]. For the most part, it's interesting and really draws you in.

-The suspense is also great. The PLL writers are really great at building tension and cliffhangers.

-The first A reveal. 

Having Mona be A was a great twist and actually made a lot of sense. I mean, she hated Alison, and she was there most of the time [like she was Hanna's best friend and all], but you wouldn't have suspected her. That was great.

-I also really liked the pilot, and the opening scene where Alison disappears. I really liked how that scene was set-up. I think it was really cool.

-The friendships

I really love the friendships between the four core girls. It seemed like they were really friends, and they all had good chemistry. Hanna seemed closer to Emily, and Spencer seems closer to Aria, and that makes a lot of sense that some of them would be closer than others. 

-I also really like the fashion of this show. For the most part, the outfits are really cute and I enjoy getting some style inspo from this show. 

-[Some of] the romance.

So, Spencer and Toby are a super cute couple and Hanna and Caleb are really cute, and Maya and Emily are another great couple. I have some quibbles with some of the other romances, but these were super cute.

The cons

-The timeline is so weird. Seasons 3-5 takes place in the span of a semester. A freaking semester. Also, Toby becomes a cop in the span of, like, two weeks, and Emily graduated college within a few episodes. 

-Ezra. I can't stand Ezra. So, he's a teacher who's in a relationship with his sixteen-year-old student. Yeah. Oh, and at first we're lead to believe that he didn't know how old she was, but he saw her in a bar and assumed she was older. Okay. Fair enough. Once he found out she was his student, he should have refused to keep dating her. That's, uh, not what he does. Oh, and later we find out that he dated Alison when he was in college and she was a freshman in high school, and the whole reason he dated Aria is because he wanted to do research on her and her friends because he was writing a book about Alison's disappearance, WTH, Ezra? 

-A lot of the other relationships for the main characters are pretty toxic, too. Emily dates Paige, a girl who literally tried to drown her, and, later Alison, a horribly manipulative girl who bullied her over her sexuality [I mean, she is nicer to Emily then the other girls but still], and a lot of the girls date older men, which is super creepy and gross. 

-All of the other A reveals are terrible. It's eventually revealed that A in seasons 3-5 is Cece Drake, a previously minor character who was a toxic friend that enabled Alison's bad behavior. Eventually, it's revealed that Cece's a trans women who's actually Alison's sister. First of all, I don't think I even have to go into why it's extremely problematic to have the only transgender character be a villain. Second of all, having Cece be a villain doesn't have the same shock value as making Mona be a villain because she was only in a few episodes. Thirdly, the writers did that thing where they made her do a lot of truly awful things [for example, literally letting the Liars take the fall for a murder they didn't commit, trapping them in this underground evil lair and psychologically torturing them] and go out of their way to portray her as sympathetic without actually redeeming her. Like, if a character's going to be that bad, put in the work to convince us why she should be redeemed.

-The next A [second half of Season Six through Season Seven] is Alex Drake, Spencer's evil, British twin.

Like, what? What was that storyline?

So, for a little bit of backstory: It's revealed in maybe Season Three-ish that Spencer is actually the half sister of Alison and Jason because her dad had an affair with Alison's mom. Okay, fair enough, That's a fine way to create some drama. Then it's revealed that Spencer is actually the daughter of Alison's mom's twin sister, who is also Cece's mom. And then there's the twin thing. 

Also, I'm not sure why they made her British? I love Troian, but she absolutely can't do a convincing British accent. PLL takes place in Pennsylvania. There are 49 other states, you know. 

-Bringing Alison back from the dead

I mean, her death kicks off the plot of the show. They say that there was this other girl in the grave, but, like, wouldn't they have different DNA? I just hate the 'bringing people back from the dead' trope. It de-values the impact of death in fiction. But, if they were determined to bring her back, they went about it the wrong way. They made Alison this innocent, nice girl which just doesn't fit with her earlier personality. Like, if they brought her back, maybe they could have brought her back and had her still be manipulative and sneaky, but fighting for the good side. Maybe they could've put more effort into redeeming her? Just a thought.

-I also think the show brought up a lot of serious content, but didn't handle it very well. They included alcoholism, eating disorders, shoplifting, PTSD and drug use, but none of them were handled very well, and they seemed to just stop, all of a sudden. I really think they should've just cut those out, if you couldn't handle it well. 

The Characters

Spencer

Spencer was, overall, my favorite character. She's an uptight, ambitious perfectionist, and sort of the leader of the group after Ali's disappearance. I think that her character was the most consistent and actually did stuff that was, y'know, relevant to the plot. Spencer definitely had her fair share of ridiculous plots, but maybe slightly less then the other girls. Spencer had this sort of rivalry with Alison in the past, which was really interesting to watch. Also, the plot where she thought she might be responsible for Ali's death was also really interesting. My main issue with Spencer is that she seemed to just randomly accuse people of being A without much evidence [maybe the writers were trying to give her a flaw, but she has several already]. I really do think that Spencer is one of the best characters on PLL and, despite the flaws with some of the way she was written, I do really like her.

Hanna

Hanna is formerly the ''loser'' of the clique who then became the queen bee of the school. I think that there are a lot of interesting parts to Hanna's character. First of all, I like that she averts the mean, popular girl trope. Sure, she's feisty and sassy but she is a very sweet person with a strong moral compass. Her friendship with Mona [even after they found out she was A] is also really interesting and that, although she's popular now, she still has a lot of her own insecurities and I loved seeing her work through them. However, I do have issues with her character in Season Seven. She just seemed super rude to everyone. And, yes, I know that some of that is due to PTSD, but she still annoyed me. I also wish they would addressed just how smart Hanna is. Sure, she had her ditzy moments and she could be impulsive, but she actually got good grades and she wasn't stupid, and I feel like the show kind of treated her as a comic relief character at times, and I wish she would have been able to figure out more things in terms of the A mystery. Still, I don't have a lot of issues with Hanna. I thought she was a pretty good character.

Aria

I was really disappointed in Aria's character. On paper, it seems like she would be a character who I would really like and relate to. She's the ''artsy'' one who's a writer and literature nerd with an alternative style. She's private about her feelings but she's friendly, and she's a huge romantic.

And, honestly, I think that in another world Aria may have been my favorite. But in this one, with the show that we have, I'm not a huge fan of her, and I'm blaming most of that on Ezra. Obviously, since it's a teen show, there's quite a bit of romance, but Aria's entire story revolves around romance. Almost everything she does relates to Ezra, which means she's kind of underdeveloped as a character, and it also makes her come off as kind of selfish because of the way she puts Ezra above everything else in her life. I wish we would have had more stories where Aria pursued her passions-----maybe a story about her writing or her photography? There were a few stories about the issues within her family-----maybe we could've had more of those? Or just something that doesn't revolve around Ezra. Please?

Emily

I really liked Emily at first. She's soft and sweet and can be a bit of a doormat, but she can also be really tough. I thought that her Season One story was really good, and she was a strong character then. I also really liked that her main hobby------swimming---is actually used in quite a few plotlines. I liked seeing how passionate she was about swimming. I think that her character development really went downhill after the first season. I think it's mostly because they didn't know what to do with her character, so she was reduced to having ''nice'' be her whole personality. I don't think she's a bad character. I just think she became kind of bland, I guess. 

Alison

I loved Alison as a character in the earlier seasons. She's an incredibly manipulative mean girl who had most of Rosewood wrapped around her pinky finger [she was either bullying of blackmailing most of them], and she was a great character. She was awful, but she was interesting. She was a bad person, but she didn't deserve to be buried alive. First of all, I didn't like how they brought her back from the dead. The only reason it worked in the books is because it's Ali's twin who died and they have the same DNA. Making it some random other girl doesn't work. It wasn't a very well-written twist. I also hated the way they destroyed her character in the later seasons. They made her go from mean girl to being suddenly a very nice and friendly person without much development. If she had to come back from the dead, I would've loved to see her struggling with becoming a better person-----that would've been great character development, as well as used her manipulative personality for good. I think that would've been more interesting. 

Final Thoughts: Is Pretty Little Liars a good show? No. Is it a bad show? Kind of, but it could be worse. If you think it looks interesting, I think the first 2-3 seasons are pretty good. And, if you liked the whole show, that's great. I'm glad you liked it.

Have you seen Pretty Little Liars? What were your thoughts on it?