The first rule of life in Rosewood, Pennsylvania: Trust No Man.
Rules two and three: Never let unrelenting harassment in relation to the murder of your best friend stop you from accessorizing and always have something funeral chic on-hand.
Oh, the girls will get you too, but there’s a code, at least. There’s a conspiratorial poetry to female treachery that is separate from brutish betrayals of the male population. These guidelines in place, we’re prepared to dive into shiny suburban chaos. Hit and runs, police corruption, secret identities, tech-savvy peeping toms, blackmail, adultery, psychiatric incarceration, and murder. Lots of it. Murder, ominous text messages and four teenage girls with great hair and terrible luck. Welcome to the world of Pretty Little Liars.

Pretty Little Liars begins when the body of teen queen Alison DiLaurentis is discovered a year after she goes missing, and the series centers on the chaos this event delivers unto her four best friends. In these friends, we find a fairly standard assortment of high school character stereotypes brought to colorful life by compelling performances. Meet Spencer, a tightly-wound overachiever carrying the wounds of a demanding household and her own perfectionism. Next up, Hanna, the dweeb-turned-It-Girl whose blossoming was Alison’s special pet project. Hanna’s “type” is clearly the good-natured ditz, but the insecurities born of an outsider past often make her the show’s beating heart. Aria is the gang’s resident alt-girl, and we can be certain that whatever spare time she can find is spent doing craft projects she found on Rookie. Beautiful swimmer jock Emily rounds out the foursome. Sensitive and quiet, the most interesting thing about Em is the string of gorgeous girls she’s dated throughout the show. Together, they’re our pretty little liars, and they’re in a lot of trouble.

Ali was the enigmatic leader, a little blonde Machiavelli in a halter top who was feared as much as loved, or maybe a bit more. She brought the girls together, gilded them to her with an intricate web of secrets, and in her death has left them adrift to weather the consequences. Seventeen year old Sasha Pieterse, a real teenager amongst the usual cast of twenty-something actors playing teen, is a spooky and arresting force in her recurring appearances, and thus Alison remains somehow ever-present even in death. The show is a mystery first and foremost, with a couple more underneath, and creates a level of true suspense many wouldn’t believe a teen drama capable of.

Anything with the word “teenage” in the description, particularly paired with the deeply feared “girl,” is loudly derided as frivolous, but what’s so bad about a little frivolity, anyway? Pretty Little Liars is fun, tightly-plotted, exciting television. The show’s young female characters are strong, dynamic, loyal to their friends and sometimes wear feather earrings. Pretty Little Liars could be the most subversively feminist show on TV.

Questions of power and control for a young woman are central to Pretty Little Liars in a very real and serious way. On the one hand, one could take a cursory view and say these girls get themselves into a lot of ridiculous trouble. How silly, what a bad example, how unrealistic. However, the narrative that creator Marlene King has spun is far more complex, more telling, more insightful about the perils of being a girl in this world. Yes, maybe not every nubile pep club president out there gets stalked by an anonymous figure bent on vengeance, but someone would be hard pressed to find a young woman who does not know what it is to be treated as a puppet, a physical entity to be manipulated and tossed, or perhaps locked, away.

The show finds ways to keep the tone light, by and large, but it would be a mistake to let that convince you that the story being told is anything but weighty. The fact is, these girls, their emotional well-being, and their female bodies, are in real and present danger throughout the series. They are each other’s only allies, and even that web of safety is made fragile by the pressures of outside forces. There is something truer to this show than many other teen-aimed stories and it’s the refusal to lose or hide amid the lip gloss and quotable dialogue the real and present danger young women face every day. Refusing to present a male hero to rescue the fair ingenues is certainly another. A reality the dominant society seems to forget is that depictions of violence against young women and Justin Bieber references are equally appropriate to the lives of teenage girls. Pretty Little Liars gets it.

In a prescient moment, Hanna says, “do you remember what Ali said about secrets keeping us close? She was wrong. They tear us apart.” and it’s hard to claim it isn’t true. It’s hard to argue that their fallen queen wasn’t mistaken in her faith in the power to be gained from the feverishly intricate privacies of girlhood. It is more obvious with each damning disclosure or nefarious blackmail plot that her secrets are their doom. But if it is true, that hasn’t stopped the girls from keeping them anyway. Like the show’s theme song says, two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

The original of this article can be found at FemaleGazeReview.com