Pretty Little Liars: Great show, or GREATEST show?

You guys.

You guys.

YOU GUYS.





How is it possible I had not seen this show until June 2012?  It. is. AMAZING.  It's on The Middle School Girl Channel (TM My Mom) otherwise known as ABC Family, which would give one pause, except it shouldn't.  It's suspenseful, soapy, engrossing, and even a little witty.  It's about four high school girls, who were best friends until a year before the pilot, when their friend Alison disappeared.  The pilot kicks off when all four of them start getting threatening text messages from a mysterious "A."   "A" knows things only Alison knew about them, but then Alison's body is discovered.  DUN DUN DUN.  The girls are trying to unravel the mystery of Alison's murder, keep "A" at bay, and wrangle love, school, and parental drama.  The plotting moves at top speed, so you never get bored with the main plot--although it does have a tendency to drop subplots for several episodes at a time and then randomly pick them back up.  Plus, it moves so freaking fast that even though whole chunks of the plot make absolutely no goddamn sense, you don't notice until they've moved on anyway.  It has it's problems (hello, pedophile English teacher and A's incomprehensible and omniscient plotting) but it is one of the most addicting, awesome, and even-- dare I say-- heartwarming shows I've seen recently.  I absolutely blitzed through the first two seasons, and when I discovered that only the most recent episode is available online (not all five from the current season) I was bereft.  BEREFT, I tell you.


This is Alison:  she's dead.  (Maybe?)

Seriously.  She's the worst.

She's also a complete sociopath, and the perfect embodiment of the intoxicatingly dangerous and bitchy best friend that every girl wants and/or has from the ages of 12-15, before she realizes that said friend is not awesome, but a terrible human being who thrives on hurting people.  You meet Alison in flashbacks, and she's constantly taunting her friends or wheedling secrets out of them.  These secrets inevitably show up in threatening texts from "A."  Alison is sort of like Lily from Veronica Mars (she even hides things in her air vents, in a total Veronica Mars homage), except with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  The show is actually pretty great at playing with the fact that after Alison died, she's portrayed as a saintly, innocent girl instead of the slutty psychopathic trainwreck she actually was.  This is particularly interesting when you meet kids outside her circle that she tormented mercilessly and watch how they struggle with seeing her sanctified by the community at large.


Meet Aria, an adorable little thing, even if my brain has a hard time telling her apart from Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, and the older sister from Modern Family.

This is only the third most cracked out thing Aria
has worn.  I think a crazy person lives in her closet.

Aria dresses like she's ready for a formal punk concert to break out at any moment, and there's some boring drama with her parents, played by Piper from Charmed and Sam Seabourne's little brother.  She's dating her English teacher, and it's GROSS.  It's not so much a false note in a symphony as a huge, clanging gong that just won't stop.  What's even worse, is the show plays this off as not creepy, because they met *before* he started teaching her and he thought she was a college student.  But here's the thing:  when he realized that a) he was her teacher and b) she was SIXTEEN, he just kept going with it.  Also, at first I thought he was a recent graduate, which would make him 22-- creepy, but it could be creepier.  Then I realized he's supposed to have a master's degree, making him...24? 25?  You know who someone in their mid-twenties has nothing in common with?  A HIGH SCHOOLER.  I don't think there's anyone on the internet who likes this pairing, so I don't know why it continues.  It gives me the willies, even if the teacher is ridiculously handsome.

Most pedophiles?  Don't look like this.

Hi Spencer!  You're crazy, but I love you.

I probably like her so much because she is clearly
a Newsies fangirl as well.

Spencer is your stereotypical overachiever, and surprise surprise, I have a soft spot for her.  She's a control freak and really uptight-- and has a bad habit of accusing basically everyone in the town with murdering Ali, and then getting surprised when people don't believe her on accusation number five.  During the first season, she ends up dating a guy she previously accused of the murder (Toby) and then accuses a guy she kissed before (Ian, also her sister's now-husband, and the *second* of her sister's boyfriends Spencer makes out with) of the murder.  Toby is one of the many sensitive loner bad boys that this show is absolutely overrun with, and there's something a little off about him...but that just might be bad acting (or his face.  I'm not sold on his face.)  Toby also has an incredibly creepy subplot with his stepsister who raped him (by saying she'd tell their parents *he* raped *her* if he wouldn't have sex with her) and then his stepsister was blinded in a prank gone wrong led by Alison.  (Got that?  There's a lot going on in this show).


This is Emily.

I can't even snark on Emily.  She's just
TOO NICE.

Emily is a star athlete (swimming, as opposed to Spencer's hilariously WASPy Field Hockey prowess) and her dad is deployed overseas, leaving her home with just her rather uptight mom.  She's the nicest of the four, even though none of them (save Alison, that bitch) are very mean.  Emily's gay, and I knew I loved this show when she came out to Aria, Spencer, and Hanna and their reaction was to shrug and ask her if she was seeing anyone really hot.  Basically, they acted like awesome, supportive friends, and that's a rarity on a teen soap.  In fact, there's almost no backstabbing or drama within the group, and when there is, it's usually orchestrated by "A" and the perpetrator 'fesses up in under two episodes.  Emily dates around a bit (she's had about 3 girlfriends, and at least one clearly Party Down-referencing lesbian karaoke date) and it's treated in the exact same way as the heterosexual romances-- the girls tease her about crushes, help her sneak out to see her girlfriend, commiserate with her when it ends, etc.  In fact, Rosewood seems to have an abundance of super hot lesbians in addition to their plethora of bad boys.  It's not all sunshine and roses (her mom was pretty awful when she first came out) but the show treats her sexual orientation as just another facet of her character.  Emily's a great athlete, a little too compassionate, anxious about her deployed dad, and also gay.  She's not "Gay Emily" and she's not an after school special.  Glee, take notes.


I saved Hanna for last, because she's the best.

She also has the world's greatest "Bitch, please" face.

No, really.  Hanna is hilarious (if a bit dim), fiercely loyal to her friends and her single mom, and surprisingly sweet.  She starts off seeming like Alison 2.0, but you figure out pretty quickly that she's just putting on a tough facade.  There's some pretty stellar acting by Ashley Benson here, in my totally unprofessional opinion.  Hanna is the one who feels the worst about the crap Alison dished out to innocent bystanders, largely because she *was* one of those bystanders at the start-- and even post-Alison's friendship, Ali still called her "Hefty Hanna." (The fat suit she wears in flashbacks is awful though. I think it might just be pillows in her shirt.  Has no one in costuming ever seen someone who weighs more than 110 lbs?)  She's a genuinely nice person, even if she does some crappy stuff sometimes.  Also, she is consistently the MVP of hilariousness:  when meeting a stranger in the woods with her friends, she tells the stranger that she left a note for her mom in case anything happens.  Later, her friends ask her if that was true, and she snaps, "Yeah.  'Dear Mommy, I went to the woods to trap a killer.'"  Okay, maybe you have to be there, but Hanna is comedy GOLD.



The boyfriends and girlfriends:

You know he's a bad boy because he has long hair.

I've chosen Caleb here to represent the myriad of boys (and girls) that go in and out of the Pretty Little Liar's lives, as many of them are interchangeable.  They also tend to disappear for episodes at a time, which is actually fine with me for the most part, because it shows that the focus of this series isn't teenage L-O-V-E but the friendship between four girls who lost their friend-- and how sometimes, they didn't even like her that much, but now she's gone and they feel guilty for not liking her.  ANYWAY, the significant others.  Mostly they're boring, but Caleb here?  Like Hanna, he's the BEST (and probably not coincidentally, he's dating Hanna).  As I said before, this show is absolutely drowning in sensitive bad boys with hearts of gold and a penchant for brooding, and damn if I don't love every minute of it.  In real life, I have absolutely no patience for brooding-- as my general unpleasantness and occasional outright hostility to my friend's high school boyfriend can demonstrate*-- but in fiction, I love that shit.  And Caleb here, with his tragic past, semi-criminal tendencies (He's a hacker! It's adorable!) and sweet nature, is the greatest--and a legitimately good boyfriend, which is also rare on teen soaps.  I desperately want him and Hanna to stay together forever and ever and have tons of babies with really intense eyebrows.


*In my defense, he was sort of a dick.


I could literally go on and on and on about how this is a great, quickly plotted (albeit not tightly-plotted) show with some amazingly proto-feminist undertones.  Think about it:  this is a show about four girls, for whom dating is pretty far down their list in favor of solving mysteries and, you know, doing things.  It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors (It includes at least two named female characters who have a conversation about something other than men-- think about all the TV shows and movies that don't pass that test.  It's an awful lot.)  The emphasis is on their friendship, not their love lives, and the four main characters are honest-to-god good friends.  Sure, they fight, but they also have sleepovers, go to each other's sporting events/art shows, and generally provide an excellent glimpse into strong female friendship.


Verdict:  Bestest show in the universe, hands down.  Watch it NOW.