Review of Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin Season One

I remember when I was a young teenager, my sister and I would sit on our parent’s terrible couch, turning on the television certain nights of the week to watch the newest episode of Pretty Little Liars. We didn’t keep watching it all the way through the end of the television series, but for a hot minute, we were tuning in to the early seasons and their episodes.

It was that nostalgia that led me to review this series at first for the online outlet I was writing for, as I worked as a film and television critic for a couple of years throughout graduate school. It was a fun time, and that was how I knew this series was coming out all the way back then.

Years later, I realized there was a season two, and I decided to revisit the series after a bit of time to see what had changed in the gap in which I first watched the series. I’ll be getting out my season two review eventually, as I had a lot of backlog when it comes to this blog (I’m already scheduled up until April!).

I don’t want to ramble too much, so let’s get into the review!

Four girls get caught up in the mystery of a killer in their local town.

Before we can understand the present day, the series sets us up for the past story. The year is 1999, and the local high school is holding a party for its students. One girl, named Angela, decides to commit suicide in the middle of the party, leaving everyone in shock.

Worst of all, her friends, Davie, Sidney, Corey, Elodie, and Marjorie, ignored her when she said she needed help. We don’t know the true story of what went down here, but then we pivot to the present day, when the women are grown up with their own kids. Davie gets a threatening message on a flyer from that party, showing what’s to come.

Her teenage daughter Imogen then finds her dead in their bathtub with her friend Karen, and there’s a huge A written in blood in the bathroom itself. Some time passes, and Imogen moves in with Sidney and her daughter Tabby. Other students—Noa, Minnie, and Faran—get a weird text message along with Imogen and Tabby, putting these girls together to solve what’s happening.

The janitor at their high school is murdered by the mysterious figure we can see stalking them in the distance. They suspect Karen as being someone who framed them for getting detention, setting up a point of contention that’s going to reach a boiling point later on in the series.

Throughout the course of the remaining episodes, we see how there’s typical high school friction going on behind the scenes. For Tabby, who works at the local movie theater, her much older manager is romantically pursuing her (I may have screamed when I saw it was Derek Klena, who I’ve seen on Broadway multiple times).

Faran is a Black ballerina who’s grappling with racism inside her classes and when they’re picking roles, while Minnie has a lot of trauma and is obsessed with the Internet, leading down some more awkward rabbitholes for her. There’s also Noa, who was sent to Juvie and is now on thin ice.

At the same time, they have to figure out who’s going around and murdering people in the town. They might find out their mothers are involved with this, plummeting us back into the past where Angela tragically took her own life in the middle of a party.

Suddenly, everything is not what it seems, and the girls might not be able to trust many people as they dive deeper into the mystery.

Overall Thoughts

I was really sad this series was canceled, as I liked it a lot more than the original series. These girls were more interesting than the WASP like characters in the original PLL series, and this reboot also plays up the horror elements a lot more than the original.

For example, there’s so much more blood and gore, and I was here for it. This is what the original should have been like from the get-go! But perhaps that would not have landed well in the early 2010s when I think about it a little harder.

That said, I think the PLL format works better with less episodes like the reboot, even though this has become more a modern concept of cutting down the content of series. Writing, to me, gets more sloppy the longer a show goes on because they start losing track of all of the threads.

Anyways, go watch this one if you’re interested and have not already! You might find it worth watching in the end.

Follow me below on Instagram and Goodreads for more.