The rise and fall of Pretty Little Liars, including predictions!

Pretty Little Liars is a teen drama about to return at the mid-point of its third season on January 8th. a.m.k explains the excruciating details of how and why it went from exciting guilty-pleasure drama to something really annoying.

I used to be a huge Pretty Little Liars fan. I say used to because it hasn't always been a terrible show, but for reasons I'll discuss, the show has fallen off a cliff. Let's cut right to chase actually and say from here on out I'll refer to it as PLL, which is exactly how I refer to it in real life. The show is clearly marketed towards people who are both another gender and much younger than myself, but I watched the pilot one week when I was dreadfully sick and working at Booster Juice, and boy did I fall hard and fast. I caught up on 20+ episodes within a matter of flu-days.

Spencer, Hanna, Aria, Emily.

The main problem for me is that the central plot of show doesn't change and also does not advance very quickly. This is due to the fact that the show is making lots of money and they want to extend what should have been a two-seasons-tops show into now at least a four-seasons one.

The main plot is pretty strong with some initial good twists -- Alison is dead, we don't know who killed her and this mysterious character with the alias 'A' haunts Alison's former four best friends, blackmailing them so they don't report the harassment to the police. We learn pretty quickly that Alison and the four girls started the fire that cost the Jenna character her sight, a secret that they don't want the cops to know for obvious reasons. What isn't so obvious is why they still haven't come clean after several more people have been murdered in relation to the Alison case and the constant danger they are in. I mean, a lot of people have died, and some scary crap has happened to some of them. On top of that, Jenna has ocular surgery and she can see again.

Poor Alison.

Since the show keeps chugging along making insane amounts of money, stringing the audience with now-random soap opera-inspired turns, they need something to focus on for the roughly 43 minutes of tape each week. About 5 of those minutes are usually spent in some kind of discussion or sleuthing about Alison's killer/A. The other 38 are spent talking about their stupid boy problems, parent problems and sometimes going to strange parties that seem surprisingly dull, despite having some pretty good costume designers and wardrobe people.