Although HBO attempted to bring back one of the most successful shows of the 2010s with a 2022 reboot, the misguided changes involved in this process resulted in a show that may have killed the cult franchise for good. Reboots and revivals are, like prequels and spinoffs, complicated. For every success story like the massively popular Cheers spinoff Frasier, there is a major failure, like Frasier’s 2023 revival.
For a reboot to work, viewers must be eager to see the original show again, meaning it needs to have been a while since its series finale. However, the more time passes, the more likely viewers are to forget about a series entirely, meaning any desire for a revival will wane. One need only glance at the 2016 reboot of the iconic ‘90s cop series The X-Files to see that even one of the most popular shows of its day can struggle to regain its footing when brought back to life.
Unfortunately, HBO failed to learn from these cautionary tales when the network realized it had a potentially profitable IP on its hands in the early 2020s. Originally airing from 2010 until 2017, Pretty Little Liars was based on the bestselling teen mystery novel series of the same name by The Lying Game author Sara Shepard. Effectively a blend of Gossip Girl’s clique-ish teen drama and the small-town murder mystery plotting of Twin Peaks, Pretty Little Liars lasted for 160 episodes across seven seasons.
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin Completely Changed The Original Show’s Formula
The original show followed the fractured friendship of Shay Mitchell’s Emily Fields, Lucy Hale’s Aria Montgomery, Troian Bellisario’s Spencer Hastings, and Ashley Benson’s Hanna Marin after the disappearance of their shared friend, Sasha Pieterse’s Alison DiLaurentis. Alison was as much a bully as a friend and the tenuous links between the girls dissolve in the year after her disappearance, but their lives are thrown back together when they start to receive anonymous messages from ‘A.’
This shady villain claims that they know the friend group’s dark shared secret, and what follows is seven long seasons of fake outs, double crosses, and wily machinations as the girls work to uncover their unnamed assailant. The plot went further and further off the rails with each season of Pretty Little Liars, as what began life as a relatively grounded teen mystery eventually became increasingly outlandish and surreal with each passing year.
Of course, the same fate befell The CW’s teen spin on Twin Peaks, Riverdale, and this never stopped the fan base’s most loyal viewers from tuning in and checking up on the latest absurd goings-on. Pretty Little Liars did an admirable job of maintaining a strong ranking in the TV ratings, with its pilot earning 2.47 million viewers while its finale raked in a thoroughly respectable 1.41 million seven years later.
Given how often teen drama shows fall out of favor the longer their runs continue and how wild the show’s storylines became in its later years, this audience retention rate was undeniably impressive. Furthermore, Pretty Little Liars spawned not one but two spinoffs, both of which lasted a single season. Ravenwood debuted while the original show was still airing, while the spinoff sequel The Perfectionists didn’t arrive until two years after the finale. Still, the existence of both shows proves just how substantial the show’s following was.
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin Could Have Been A Good Standalone Horror Series
Within this context, the success of a Pretty Little Liars reboot seemed almost inevitable. If the creators simply waited until the original stars were old enough to play a generation on, a follow-up legacy sequel could bring back Spencer, Emily, Aria, Hanna, and Alison and check in on their adult lives. The older characters could be pursued by a new ‘A,’ or their children could even be the new show’s true protagonists.
However, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin arrived way too early to explore this premise, meaning HBOMax’s reboot instead had to radically reinvent the show’s entire premise to work. Moving from a PG-13 teen mystery to a gory R-rated horror slasher, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin introduced an entirely unrelated slasher storyline involving five teen girls in a secluded small town who are targeted by a masked murderer adopting the ‘A’ persona.
Outside the anonymous messages from ‘A’ and a few jarring references to the original show’s heroines, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin took nothing from its predecessor. Closer in tone to Mindhunter or Silence of the Lambs than the soapy style of the original series, the reboot was grim, brutal, and downbeat, prioritizing shock value over fun at every turn. Even the setting moved from the suburbs to a more remote, rural small town, meaning the show looked nothing like its iconic predecessor.
To be fair to Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who took over from Pretty Little Liars showrunner Marlene King, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin isn’t terrible as a dark horror show. It is about as watchable as the worst season of Netflix’s horror anthology Slasher, and could have worked fine as a nasty teen slasher story in the vein of Netflix’s Fear Street movies if viewers weren’t led to expect a Pretty Little Liars reboot.
HBO’s Failed Pretty Little Liars Reboot Makes A Future Reunion Less Likely
However, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin was very much sold as a reinvention of the Pretty Little Liars franchise, and its second season, Summer School, even doubled down on this with more returning characters and more direct references to the main characters from the original show. Season 1 only had one recast version of an incidental character.
In contrast, Summer School had Annabeth Gish’s returning supporting character, Dr. Anne Sullivan, in almost every episode and a direct mention of the original show’s heroine Aria. This did nothing to win over fans of the earlier hit, since Summer School still felt nothing like an extension of the original Pretty Little Liars world.
Mindhunter Meets Poirot In Agatha Christie’s Darkest 3-Part Adaptation
This show’s shockingly dark twist on Hercule Poirot’s world stars Agatha Christie’s beloved detective in a story fit for Netflix’s Mindhunter.
However, it did hammer another nail into the franchise’s coffin. Thanks to the two-season revival, Pretty Little Liarshas now only been dormant as a franchise for two years, since 2024, not nine years, since 2017’s original series finale. As such, the odds of viewers receiving a Pretty Little Liars reboot anytime in the near future are now vanishingly low.
- Release Date
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2010 – 2017-00-00
- Showrunner
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Ina Marlene King
