I Shouldn’t Be Watching This: ‘Pretty Little Liars’

I Shouldn’t Be Watching This takes a writer who would otherwise have no interest in watching a show and throws them right into it. The aim is to assess how a show works for its target demographic and whether it has merit outside of it.

Well, this isn’t a scenario I ever saw myself in. Watching, let alone writing about Pretty Little Liars is definitely not something on my normal wish list for TV, but it’s increasingly common that people find pleasure in TV that was not geared toward them at all. The landscape of television may be leaning toward more, if not all, niche programming in the future. The need for “broad appeal” that broadcast networks have long pined for is subsiding across the board. Trying out different types of TV can be enjoyable and edifying; in the case of Pretty Little Liars, it’s a mixed bag.

Similar to Gossip Girl (in many more respects than this), Pretty Little Liars comes based off of a series of (ugh) “young adult novels.” The series follows an estranged high school clique a year after their friend Allison disappeared. The gang then has to navigate a new high school social structure as well as dealing with a mysterious stalker that goes only by “A.” What results is a kind of mashup of Secret Life of the American Teenager and Scream. It’s not entirely unwatchable from my perspective, but it’s definitely catnip to the show’s demographic.

PLL seems to be going for a kind of “seemingly good girls do bad things” vibe with this show, but it’s still ABC Family–the scandal isn’t shocking by TV standards at all. In the pilot we discover that (gasp) some of them drink! and (gasp!) some of them smoke pot! and (GASP) some of them make out with teachers! Perhaps to the 13-year-olds ABC Family is trying to hook, these are offences of the highest degree, but as a good-girls-do-bad soap, the show doesn’t bring a lot to the table.

Where the show does excel is its cheesy as hell stalker plot. Throughout the first season of this show, we periodically get to see the mischievous presence of “A” break the monotony of the girls talking about essays or English teachers. This becomes a pretty comical beat that the show goes to annoyingly often. So much so that if someone who didn’t speak a word of English watched this show, they would think it was about rich people looking very, very scared of their text messages. This is prime guilty pleasure fuel for even the most jaded of TV viewers like myself.

In terms of acting, we have some CW-level ridiculousness in terms of casting 25-year-olds who look like 27-year-olds to play 16-year-olds. For the most part, the central cast holds their own, but no one is turning in particularly fun work, except for Tammin Sursok as the group’s blind adversary Jenna.

Pretty Little Liars can work outside of its demo on the level of ridiculous plot devoid of internal logic, but not really on any other level. The acting is stiff, the characters say exactly what they’re feeling and exactly what’s happening almost to the point where they’re reciting the “previously on” segment. Most annoying by far is the show’s unnerving reliance on soundtrack. I guess it’s a convention of the drama, but I don’t think there is a five second stretch in the first six episodes of this show that isn’t backed by a loud and annoying pop song or cheesy score to tell you exactly how you should be feeling about the situation. Maybe PLL is trying to sell CDs, but the music on this show is mindnumbing.

As a guilty pleasure, Pretty Little Liars can definitely work, even for someone like me. As a legitimate piece of television, it’s pretty stale without enough craziness to balance the clichéd aspects of the production.