‘Pretty Little Liars’ can save itself from the dark spiral with a happy ending
Pretty Little Liars has put me through a lot over its seven seasons, but not nearly as much as it has put the liars through. Freeform’s series takes its final bow in a twohour finale Tuesday (8 p.m. ET/ PT), after 160 episodes. But I already stopped watching years ago.
The first season of the show was tight, thrilling and soapy: It follows a group of four friends — Aria (Lucy Hale), Hanna (Ashley Benson), Spencer (Troian Bellisario) and Emily (Shay Mitchell) — who are reunited a year after their friend, Alison (Sasha Pieterse), goes missing. They begin to get harassing and cruel messages from a mysterious “A,” who seems to know things that only their missing friend would know. The four young actresses were instantly appealing, especially Mitchell as Emily, who reckons with her sexuality before coming out to her parents and friends. The show’s mood and central mystery helped it garner the intense fan following it maintains to this day.
Too bad it couldn’t last. Subsequent seasons stretched the show’s concept too far. The first “A” was discovered, but soon the girls were terrorized by a second “A.” That reveal gave way to a time jump and “A.D.” Plot holes became more apparent the longer the show went on, and its melodramatic tropes became cloying and tiresome.
What eventually made me stop watching, however, wasn’t the decline in quality but the constant barrage of misery and trauma its protagonists were put through. Aria, Hanna, Spencer, Emily — and later, Alison (who was revealed to have been alive all along a few seasons in) — go through more kidnappings, harassment, false accusations and assaults than I can name. Many shows put their characters through difficulties (see Meredith Grey on Grey’s
Anatomy). Conflict makes for good drama. But the longer I watched Liars, the more difficult it was to watch the main characters go through so much trauma with almost no relief.
Violent crime and harassment are a huge part of the protagonists’ lives, but at some point, Li-
ars became more exploitative. For me, that happened when the girls were kidnapped by “A” at the end of Season 5 and physically and psychologically tortured. I was glad I had stopped watching when, this “A” was revealed to be a crazed transgender woman, a much-criticized move that played into stereotypes.
Liars shone not when it served endless “OMG” moments designed to send fans into a Twitter frenzy, but when it focused on the friendships at the heart of the series. It succeeded in telling stories about young women dealing with the same problems as other girls — when they weren’t dealing with stalkers and murders, of course. Sure, the mystery was always important, but it wasn’t the only thing. Everything feels dramatic when you’re a teen.
I’m going to watch the series finale, because I’m hoping these women will find some kind of peace. On a show that made its name with bombastic plot twists, the most surprising twist of all might be to let its protagonists be happy in the end. Even if it’s a pretty little lie.