Pretty Little Liars Renewed (Again) - Spinoff announced

[PhoenixHope]

So, as some know I watch and pretty much love Pretty Little Liars so the renewal for another season (this is a fifth season renewal - it was renewed for a forth awhile back and just finished airing season three last week) is happy news for me, but the idea that they was doing a spin-off... Well, that seems weird, but spin-offs are all the rage these days.

And to be fair this spin-off will be set in the same universe it will apparently have it's own characters with a brand new story. So A will not suddenly be in the next town messing with someone, or will she?
(Nor will someone apparently try to escape A by moving to the next town.)

From “Pretty Little Liars” executive producers I. Marlene King, Oliver Goldstick, Joseph Dougherty and Leslie Morgenstein, “Ravenswood” will center on a town, not far from Rosewood, PA (the home base of “Pretty Little Liars”), which has suffered under a deadly curse for generations. Five strangers suddenly find themselves connected by this fatal curse and need to dig into the town's mysterious and terrible history before it's too late for each of them. The series will premiere on ABC Family following the annual “Pretty Little Liars” special Halloween episode in October 2013.

Link

Yes, okay, since the new series will clearly have paranormal elements that might seem weird since on the surface Pretty Little Liars is just a regular universe, but for those of us watching the show we know there's been some paranormal elements on Pretty Little Liars, and also possibly Alison (A?) herself is one of those elements.

Seriously, I've often thought while it made sense for Mona or even Jenna to be against the girls there are other things since the reveal that Mona was A that makes it seem weird that A continued beyond (but not without) Mona. Of course, I've often thought A was tied up with who killed Alison, but it doesn't seem like Mona killed Alison.

Now you may be asking who killed Alison - which is a very good question, but nobody knows. Way back I thought it was Jenna and Garret, but that seems to be not the case. Hell, nobody knows at this point if Alison is even actually dead, despite her body having been found a season ago. And I've often thought the one way this series would make sense is if one of the pretty little liars killed Alison and she was getting revenge from beyond the grave. Though to be fair Alison did appear to Hanna when she was all drugged out after an accident and implied that she wasn't A by saying she needed to take care of A. But that was back when Mona was A, and now Mona is another As bitch.

Well, season three revealed Mona got a partner who helped her out after she got caught for being A. Who is this partner? No idea, but apparently she wears an Alison mask and may actually be Alison.

So you see - you think this is a soap, and in some ways it really is, but then there's this other whole big part of it. Really Pretty Little Liars is a soap but it's also a mystery - it's basically what Ringer wanted to be, but Ringer unlike Pretty Little Liars just couldn't pull off.

So, yeah, I'm kinda excited for the spin-off, especially since it seems like it will be its own thing just set in the same universe as Pretty Little Liars, but that's why the news of a spin-off came as a shock to me because Pretty Little Liars itself is stretching the A story out almost too much as it is, and while there are a wealth of characters on Pretty Little Liars it would be hard to build a series around them without A - but it looks like the folks behind the spin-off knew all this, so I'm kinda thrilled right now.

[RJDiogenes]

I never knew anything about Pretty Little Liars, but it sounds pretty twisted. Almost like Twin Peaks.

[PhoenixHope]

Yeah, I don't know what it was about the description for this series that convinced me to give it a try, because I was thinking some watered down teen soap, but then in the first episode you could just tell this series was gonna be so much more and maybe even so much fun.

Someone was stalking the four girls - someone who knew lots of things they shouldn't. Someone calling themself only A, but was obviously a play on Alison DiLaurentis the dead mean girl, or missing, because when this series started the implication was that Alison was dead but her body hadn't yet been found so potentially she was merely a missing person.

However, over the course of the first season it seemed that Alison wasn't A, because it seemed like A loathed Alison as much as they loathed the pretty little liars - Alison's often unwitting/innocent crew.
(For example, there was a girl who ended up blind because of Alison - she done something with a firecracker that ended with Jenna being blind, so Jenna had ~reasons~ for hating. But then it's later revealed that Jenna seduced her half-brother Toby, and that he was mostly unwilling because Jenna herself is kinda evil - she was the parents golden girl and if Toby didn't go along with her wishes he knew the parents would believe her lies over his truth.)

Basically there was a list of suspects that could've been A, but then A is revealed to be a somewhat harmless seeming friend of Hanna's. Basically, Hanna used to be a fat girl that was helped by Alison and ended up a popular girl and one of Alison's BFFs, so back when Hanna was a fat girl she was friends with Mona, but then once Hanna became a popular girl... Well, Mona wasn't left behind, but she wasn't Hanna's BFF anymore either, because Hanna suddenly had Alison, Aria, Emily, and Spencer.

But another thing over the first season that seriously pointed to Jenna was that apparently Jenna hired Caleb to spy on the pretty little liars, but Caleb grew close to Hanna and started falling in love, so ultimately he stopped working for Jenna and has pretty much been dating Hanna every since.

But during all this Toby (Jenna's half brother) became something of a suspect and for awhile the pretty little liars was scared of him. But eventually he became friends with Emily - he wanted to be more than friends, but around this time Emily was realizing that she wasn't into men, and so Toby actually stood by her and helped her come out.
(PS - A totally knew Emily was gay, or at least if not gay had in the past had a crush on Alison, before Emily herself even understood.)

Eventually Toby started dating Spencer (the team brain) and slowly the audience started to forget why we suspected Toby in the first place and so began to think he was safe, so of course in season three the show reveals that he's been working for/with A, but then in the end it's revealed he was only doing it to help Spencer and Emily. But not before the whole thing drives Spencer literally crazy - her extreme smarts pretty much worked against her, basically. Like me she thought she'd have it solved and then she wouldn't have it, and where as I enjoy that aspect Spencer isn't like me and so it drove her nuts.

Still when Mona was finally revealed as A the audience (or at least I was) left wondering where the show was gonna go now, because with Mona outed as A it seemed the A story was over. Shows what I know, because now it seems that instead of there being one big A-Team there's actually two "shadow" groups working in Rosewood. Team A who's goal for the pretty little liars is somewhat unclear. And another group who hated Alison and by default the pretty little liars, and their goal seems to be the deaths of the pretty little liars.
(And Alison apparently had something (video) on the second group and that's why the second group is so murderous, because they don't want the sex lies and videotape to ever see the light of day, though the liars themselves don't have it, but this second group seems to think that with the liars out of the way no one else would look for it.)

And and over the course of season two (I think) it was revealed that Alison had been stalked by A first, and had been working (along with all the other stuff she had going on in her life, which was a lot! Even after her death she's a busy girl - running around still trying to deal with A - appearing as a ghost/vision to some of the pretty little liars and Hanna's mother, though in that one she appeared as baby Alison and not teen Alison - and then in the season three final pulling them plus Mona out of the burning house ie saving them from certain death - living and dead Alison is a very busy girl is what I'm saying) to find out who A was. And before her "death" she figured it out, which sorta killed my idea that once it was learned that A (Mona) went after Alison first that Alison ended up faking her death so she could solve the mystery without the stalker dogging her every step.

Basically, what I'm saying is that this show is pretty much a clusterfuck, but it's a good clusterfuck is what I'm saying. There's all kinds of stuff always going on, and you can never actually trust anyone (sometimes not even the pretty little liars themselves), and while sometimes the twists and turns are pretty much over-the-top somehow it just always works. And even when you think you've figured something out - wait a few minutes and it will be revealed that you've got it all wrong.

[RJDiogenes]

Interesting. Definitely has a Twin Peaks vibe, although Twin Peaks couldn't sustain it after the first season. I'm surprised my sister isn't watching this show.