Getting Through Season One Of Pretty Little Liars Without Losing Your Mind
Season one of Pretty Little Liars runs for twelve episodes and introduces four main characters: Spencer Hastings, Alison DiLaurentis, Hanna Marin, and Emily Fields. Someone starts sending them threatening messages under the name "A," and the whole season is built around figuring out who that person is. The show premiered on ABC Family in June 2010 and became a ratings hit pretty quickly. The setup happens in the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania. Alison DiLaurentis is the popular girl at Rosewood High, and she's just disappeared after being at a party. The next morning, each of the four remaining girls gets a text message from "A" that says "Liars" followed by something they did wrong. Alison's body isn't found during this season. Her younger brother Jason is the one who disappears toward the end, and that's basically the cliffhanger that drove everyone to keep watching. Spencer is the one who first connects with "A" directly. She gets a call and talks to the person behind the messages. The show spends most of its episodes making you suspect different people: Mona, Toby, Charlotte, Jenna, even the girls themselves. By the final episode, the big reveal is that Mona DiLaurentis, Alison's supposed best friend, has been the one messaging them the whole time. That changes everything going into season two.
I remember watching this back when it came out and posting my theories on a forum thread. People were already convinced Toby was the answer because he was being shady around Charlotte's office and all. The show clearly wanted you to suspect him. Then it turned out to be Mona, which honestly felt like a letdown on some level because everyone had built this elaborate theory around Toby being the antagonist. It worked as a plot twist, but it also meant the writers were playing a bit too close to standard teen drama tropes. There are a few things about this season that don't hold up as well as they did in 2010. The pacing drags in episodes four through six, which are mostly filler while the mystery stalls. Episode seven, "It's Still A Game Of Chance," is where things pick back up. If you're trying to get through it fast, those middle episodes are skippable without losing the actual plot threads. The show's biggest weakness this season is that it contradicts itself on what "A" knows. There are scenes where the messages clearly come from someone who was physically present at locations, and other scenes where "A" seems to have supernatural knowledge of what's happening inside locked rooms. I tried once to map out the timeline of exactly when each message was sent relative to the characters' movements, and I gave up after episode three because the math didn't work. The production team wasn't tracking continuity very carefully at that point.
Another thing to note is that Alison's flashback scenes throughout the season aren't consistent in tone. Some of them feel like genuine memories and some feel like they're showing events that haven't actually happened yet. The show uses this ambiguity intentionally, but it makes it hard to tell what actually occurred versus what's being manipulated by "A." If you want to know what really happened at that party the night Alison disappeared, you're not getting a clear answer until much later in the series. The performances are solid across the board, especially Lucy Hale as Aria and Troian Bellisario as Spencer. Sasha Pieterse does the work as Alison even though she's mostly absent from the live timeline. Shay Mitchell holds her own as Emily even though her character gets shortchanged a bit this season with not a lot of screen time outside of the swim team subplot. If you're looking for where to watch it, the first season is available on Netflix in most regions, and you can also buy individual episodes or the full season on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. Hulu sometimes has it depending on your region and licensing deals.
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Overall, season one gets the job done as a pilot for the franchise. It establishes the mystery format and the core relationships. It's not the tightest show to watch in one sitting because the middle episodes sag, but if you stick with it through the Mona reveal, it delivers something worth remembering. The real problem with this season is that it sets up expectations that the show never quite satisfies in the years that follow. You'll find yourself rewatching it for that ending and then feeling like the rest of the series spends years unpicking what that reveal actually meant.
