Pretty Little Liars (PLL) is an ABC Family original series, based off the book series of the same name by Sara Shepard. The teen murder-mystery/thriller/drama first aired in 2010, and recently completed its sixth season. Following the continual success of the hour-length show (including ads), the storyline of the program has been extended beyond that of the original novels.
Based in the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania, PLL follows the lives of four (*spoiler alert* later 5) girls, Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson) and Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario), who grow distant following the disappearance/’death’ of their leader, Alison DiLaurentis (Sasha Pieterse). A year later, the friends are brought back together at Alison’s funeral, where they begin receiving anonymous messages from ‘A’, threatening to expose the girls’ deepest and darkest secrets. Aside from the personal, school, relationship and family dramas that play out throughout the series, the overarching storyline is that of the liars1 developments in unmasking ‘A’ (only took them six seasons to get there!).
Aside from the cliff-hanging addictiveness of the show, its success with females aged 12-34 is predominantly due to its authenticity in the “…portrayal of how girls talk to each other and think about their social experiences” (Green 2014). This enables the show to be highly relative and engaging to its viewers, therefore forming a fandom that garners a strong connection to the show, its characters and its creators.
As discussed by Matt Hills, fandoms are often stereotyped as “obsessive, freakish, hysterical, infantile & regressive social subjects” (2007). In saying this, it is important to note that the word ‘fan’ is derived from ‘fanatic’, which is often defined as “extreme, irrational devotion” (Markman 2014). External to the groups themselves, the term ‘fandom’ generally has negative connotations, whereby as mentioned, fans’ emotional attachments to media texts are typically deemed to be irrational (Hills 2007). As touched on in the week six lecture, fan cultures are commonly viewed upon as a problem for ‘legitimate culture’, due to these groups’ insistence on blurring cultural boundaries by praising mass culture texts such as Pretty Little Liars as equal to that of high culture texts.
In relation to Henry Jenkins’ ‘textual poachers’ theory, PLL fans take on the role as ‘active producers and manipulators of meaning’ (1992). This translates to the way by which viewers find pleasure in parts of the show that are not necessarily deemed pivotal by the program’s producers, for example through the support and analysis of character relationships (known as ‘shipping’2) and costumes. Although the program is first and foremost broadcast on cable television, the PLL fandom exists with most gravitas in the online realm, expanding over Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit, as well as specialty fan sites and forums. While fandoms existed prior to the foundation of social media platforms, with their first-known presence stemming back to the late 19th century (Busse 2009), these platforms have created the illusion of “intimacy at a distance” (Horton and Wohl 1956), allowing millions of fans, including myself, to feel consistently connected to the show, its characters, and its social media-savvy writer, I. Marlene King.
As fandoms are typically group affairs, many participants are motivated by the passion and values of the collective group just as much as they are by their own devotion to PLL (Horton and Wohl 1956). Together, the PLL fandom decode each episode scene by scene, sharing their own ideas and theories of who ‘A’ could possibly be, taking note and dissecting the most minute details of the show. In some cases, this has even led fans to create their own narratives based on the plot and its characters, producing what is known as ‘fan-fiction’3.
However, unlike most, the PLL fandom is not one-sided, but rather encouraged by the shows creators; namely the ABC Family cable network and writer, King. Via her Twitter account, King consistently fuels the PLL fandom fire by dropping clues and confirming or denying fan theories. In response to the anticipation from committed fans for the season six finale (aka the actual reveal of ‘A’), ABC Family created a website purely for the episode, rewarding the show’s followers for tweeting the hashtag #FaceToFace in the hours leading up to the big reveal. For every 100,000 times the hashtag was tweeted, a new clue was announced. All 14 clues were revealed in a relatively short period of time, meaning prior to its premiere, fans had tweeted about it over 1,400,000 times. This is a clear indicator of the large-scale presence and impact of the PLL fandom.
Footnotes:
1. Liars: The four protagonists of Pretty Little Liars are commonly referred to as the ‘liars’.
2. Shipping: A term used to describe fan fictions that take previously created characters and put them as a pair. It usually refers to romantic relationships, but it can refer platonic ones as well. (Just think of “shipping” as short for “relationSHIP”.) – Urban Dictionary
3. Fan-fiction: fiction written by a fan of, and featuring characters from, a particular TV series, film, etc.
References:
Busse, K. (2009). Fans, fandom, and fan studies. Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. SAGE Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 386-91.
Green, E. (2014). How Pretty Little Liars Redeems the Pop-Culture Mean Girl. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/how-i-pretty-little-liars-i-redeems-the-pop-culture-mean-girl/282877/ [Accessed 15 Oct. 2015].
Hills, M. (2004). Defining cult TV: texts, inter-texts and fan audiences. In: A. Hill and R. Allen, ed., The Television Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.
Horton, D. and Wohl, R. (1956). Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance. Psychiatry. Vol 19.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers. New York: Routledge.
Markman, M. (mickeleh). (2014). YouTube Abuse | Jason | 2 of 3. [Online Video]. 14 October. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT9MUUyaGqg. [Accessed: 16 October 2015].
Pretty Little Liars. Television show. Warner Brothers Studios. Burbank, CA.
