Pretty Little Liars carried me through my last months of high school, into college and through my first year of graduate school… Seven years of Tuesday nights glued to the TV. In college, I founded a viewing club in my dorm (The Lamont N.A.T. Club, named after the villainous surveillance squad on the show.) The first ever Christmas special aired after I had graduated and moved three hours away, but I hopped on the bus in order to spend that sacred hour with the club members before promptly riding back home. When I graduated, a cut out photo of the protagonists rippled through the air as I tossed my cap (it was glued on the back!) I won’t go into other embarrassing anecdotes, but this show really shaped my transition from adolescence to young adulthood (back to adolescence… clearly I am only interested in shows about teens for teens.)
Pretty Little Liars was the first show on ABC Family (the network now known as Free Form) to feature a lesbian protagonist, one of four high school girls growing up in the small, fictional suburb of Rosewood, PA. At a time when organizations like GLAAD stressed the importance of positive media narratives surrounding LGBTQ people, in light of the spike in suicides among non-straight middle school and high school students, PLL gave us Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), a mixed race Filipina girl who was swim captain, a loyal friend, and wanted to kiss other girls. Following the slew of these gay-positive media narratives GLAAD was hoping for, Pretty Little Liars diligently covered Emily’s process of self-discovery, from stolen kisses inside the proverbial closet, to her coming-out as a lesbian, proud of her identity, but reminding friends and viewers that she, and other LGBTQ youth, are just like everyone else.
The world seemed to dramatically change in the years that followed, with the federal legalization of gay marriage, the ever-growing number of celebrities coming out as bisexual, gay, or queer, and the softening of labels that define gender identity and sexual orientation. As the world changed, so did the representation of sexuality on Pretty Little Liars. This transformation increased the number of queer girls (both cis and trans), but also changed the narrative of their stories from the traditional coming-out-of-the-closet, fixed identity tale, to a more fluid, queer depiction that may mirror the lived experiences of many of the younger LGBTQ fans. At the series conclusion, after a seven season run, PLL offers fans not just one but a dozen characters that live and love queerly without labels, and without pressure in the story arc to define themselves.
But first, for the snobs who don’t watch texting teenager thrillers, some plot! Pretty Little Liars tells the story of four teenage girls, a group of friends marked by the disappearance of their queen bee. While grieving the loss of their manipulative and charismatic friend Allison DiLaurentis (Sasha Pieterse), the four girls become the targets of a seemingly omnipotent cyber bully who has constant surveillance over them, intimate access to their secrets, and a desire to wreak havoc in their interpersonal lives- not unlike their old friend Allison who collected secrets, and people, to use as weapons in her social pawn game. At first, the girls believe that maybe their friend Alison is merely hiding and playing an elaborate trick on everyone, because this cyber stalker knows things that only she knew. Once Allison’s body is found, the four girls, Spencer Hastings, Hannah Marin, Emily Fields and Aria Montgomery, come to terms with the death of their “frienemy” and the reality that a stranger seems to know everything about them.
As the show proceeds, this masked, hooded figure, known only as “A” reveals itself to be a skilled killer. In a complicated series of dreams and hallucinations which end up being real, the girls realize that Allison is actually alive and has been in hiding to protect herself from A. The girls must decide how much they can trust their old friend, and how to keep her safe enough so that she may return to Rosewood. This group of five powerful female protagonists barely has time to go to first period with their constant sleuthing, desperately trying to discover the identity of the person who has been tormenting them since the summer of Alison’s disappearance. With all the blackmail, kidnapping, torture and even murder, “Rosewood is a kind of hell, but it’s also a kind of heaven. Queer heaven.”[1]
Though there are many elements of the series that contribute to the making of a queer television show, I focus on rejection of the ontologized gay identity (see post: Ontologized Homosexual Identity) through the representation of sexual fluidity and a lack of identity labels, as well as the near absence of the coming-out narrative. This destabilized sexual identity contributes to the post-modernist and post-structuralist approach to gender and sexuality inherent in queer studies… aka how to discern an “authentic” queer narrative from a traditional gay plot.
[1] One of queer culture critic Heather Hogan’s most memorable statements about Pretty Little Liars. Heather Hogan, “Pretty Little Liars Recap (5.5): The grave never bothered me anyway,” AfterEllen, July 10, 2014, 3. http://www.afterellen.com/tv/221527-pretty-little-liars-recap-505-miss-me-x-100
Raised on TV: Queer Adolescence through Syndicated Sexualities 