PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: What a Strange, Guilty Pleasure Indeed

On the patient lap of Netflix, the seventh season of Pretty Little Liars is already curling up comfortably. That’s an awful lot of wasted time, I won’t deny it.

I thought I had reached peak despair back in season three. But no, I’m still watching, grinding my teeth, tearing my hair out, and usually not knowing whether to laugh or cry. What is it about this show? Some hidden masochistic tendencies? Deep-seated disorders I’m not aware of? A quick glance at Reddit, Tumblr, and IMDb forums, and I know I’m not alone in this madness. Everyone is crying. Everyone is complaining. After the finale of the first part of season six and the big reveal of the identity of the ultimate villain (known as A), the main producer and writer I.

Marlene King became one of the most hated figures on the internet. To the point that she completely vanished from social media, where she had previously been incredibly active.

The expectation bubble, inflated to the breaking point, turned out to be, at best, a timid little fart. Everyone was outraged—fans from ages five to fifty, the LGBT community, even the actors themselves looked like they had second thoughts.

And yet? And yet everyone keeps watching. They throw their hands up and watch. They grumble, they hate-tweet—and they watch.

What is it about this show?!

It’s much easier to list what it doesn’t have. Namely: no good acting, no coherent plotlines, no logic in the script (and I’m not talking about plot holes here, but flat-out glaring inconsistencies), no fresh ideas, no genuine twists… Wait, no, there are twists, but again, no sense in them whatsoever.

Side characters multiply, only to turn out, after a dozen or so episodes, to be irrelevant to the plot and vanish like a golden dream (because the actor signed a contract for a lead role in another production, or the actress had a baby).

Clues hyped as super important turn out to be dead ends because the writers have no idea how to develop them. The central location, the sleepy town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania, turns out to be a breeding ground for incompetence and perversion. In Rosewood, a few rules apply: every cop is an idiot, and if by chance they aren’t, they’re definitely working for Team Evil.

Every attractive man around thirty is only interested in girls under eighteen—sometimes several at once. Every buried corpse has a solid chance of coming back from the dead. And A is everywhere, making Big Brother look like an amateur. A can hide messages in random fortune cookies. Appear in breakfast cereal. Tuck clues in a victim’s tooth (!). Bribe and blackmail literally anyone. And biblical miracles happen too: the blind see, the lame walk, and husbands and wives reconcile at least thirty times—each one just as unexpected and shocking.

You see, it started off well—that’s the thing. Pretty Little Liars in the first two seasons was an interesting, gripping entry in the mystery teen TV genre. We meet the girls—Spencer (the smart one), Emily (the loyal one), Hanna (the admiring one), and Aria (the empathetic one)—as they try to cope with the mysterious death of their friend Alison. A first-class sociopath, manipulative, mean, nasty, yet with such magnetism (and undisputed status as queen of the whole scene) that you couldn’t help but be drawn to her. Each girl has her own secrets; Alison had the most. Someone knows those secrets and plans to use them, blackmailing, stalking, and tormenting each clique member individually.

Had the show wanted to maintain any semblance of quality, it should have ended with those first two seasons, concluding with the reveal of the first A (by the way, the best-acted and most rational character). There were plenty of great elements: intriguing mysteries, secrets that were actually difficult and painful, a few interesting and important themes (such as one of the girls grappling with her sexuality). A lot of good stuff—and what’s more—and probably the key to the enduring popularity of this nosediving series—a few clever tricks, or rather (back then) fulfilled promises.

The most important of these: in Rosewood, nothing happens by accident.

Simple, genius, and insidious. The consistent delivery of this promise in the early seasons cemented the belief among loyal viewers that the Pretty Little Liars creators knew what they were doing. If they plant a clue, it must matter. If someone uses a particular phrase, it must have a deeper meaning. If someone smiles mysteriously, there must be a big story behind it.

This is how the Pretty Little Liars team cultivated legions of eager viewers, hungry for more and combing every detail of the script for meaning.

It only took a simple trick—keeping A’s identity secret for as long as possible and multiplying side plots. Fan pages were flooded with theories. Some sounded like they’d been lifted straight from soap operas and Brazilian telenovelas—X is actually Y’s twin, hidden by Z because of her affair with B, and so on. Others were so brilliantly thought-out and detailed that the writers, led by Marlene, should have humbly taken notes from their fans. Instead, they focused on sowing disinformation. Oh, Varjak. Oh, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Then the enigmatic figures of the Black Widow and the Red Coat.

Then the Radley psychiatric hospital, which, apparently, every single Rosewood resident must eventually end up in. Sensing a good ratings boost, they kept stoking the fire without the slightest restraint, fully aware that they were making promises they had no intention of keeping. So let’s throw in a handful of random characters. Let the viewers think they matter, since they still believe everything we do has meaning. Let’s milk it while we can!

This ruthless milking extended off-screen too. Carefully coached actors gave cryptic interviews, oozing enthusiasm and accidentally dropping unexpected spoilers. Oh, the payoff will be so huge, you’ll never recover. Nobody’s expecting this.

Nobody has guessed the truth—once I saw the right theory, I jotted down the fan’s name to congratulate them later—Marlene chirped nonchalantly. Oh wow. Marketing-wise, it was all incredibly clever—whether it was fair to viewers is another matter.

The mid-season six finale approached, and then the bomb dropped. The nature of the bomb remains unclear to this day, but its implications are thought-provoking. On the most active fan forum, a troll appeared, claiming to be a fired Pretty Little Liars editor who’d been let go for drug use.

Disillusioned and bitter, he said—ask away. I don’t care anymore, I’ll tell you everything.

Not the first troll to claim inside connections, of course. And certainly not the last. But there was something weird about this one. He described the events of the next two episodes with uncanny accuracy—every word came true. Then—he revealed who A was. What’s more, his candidate made sense. A lot of sense. He described the backstory, the execution, even a scene (involving an accent) that would have been fantastic had it actually happened. The whole thing gained so much traction that it reached Marlene and her clique, each of whom gave interviews discrediting the so-called troll’s revelations.

Then the finale aired, of course with a completely different A. The finale that disappointed everyone and carried at least a few glaring plot contradictions. As if someone had cobbled it together in a rush, planning an unexpected reshoot…

This is, of course, a conspiracy theory, with as many believers as detractors—but it fits well into the broader PLL universe. The creators kept inflating the bubble as long as they could. They milked the trend dry. And while they surely gained a lot from it, ultimately it was a shot in the foot—they couldn’t live up to the expectations they themselves had fueled. Whether the informant was real or not (some even suggested the informant was a calculated, sanctioned plant).

They showed us A, explained why that person was A, and the groan of disappointment echoed far and wide. It was so contrived, so naive, so nonsensical.

So unfair to all who had come to respect A as a master manipulator and a seasoned strategist. Just a thick soup of bland emotions. Absolutely revolting.

And what’s the most surprising part? That this machine is still running. Duped, misled, led astray, viewers still believe that something will surprise them. That the creators are capable of seducing them—and that they even care to try. The second part of season six takes place five years after the previous finale. The girls (in theory) have grown up, started new lives, finished college, begun their careers. In practice—their mentality is still firmly stuck in high school. There’s a new villain and a new big mystery, and damn it, we’re letting ourselves get roped in again, thinking this time it’ll make sense.

It’s like that sore spot on the inside of your cheek—you know it’s bothering you, but you can’t stop poking it. We cry, we watch, we waste time. A guilty pleasure, for sure, but is it really so much of a pleasure…