In 2005, 27-year-old Sara Shepard was working as a ghostwriter for Alloy, the publishing-marketing conglomerate behind the mega-hit series Gossip Girl, when she came up with a book idea: After a teenage girl goes missing and is presumed dead, her best friends are terrified that they might be targeted next. Shepard set the mystery in the fictional town of Rosewood, inspired by the Philadelphia Main Line suburb where she grew up.
Based on eight chapters alone, Shepard sold the first four books of the series, called Pretty Little Liars.
Sara Shepard (author of the Pretty Little Liars series): I knew I wanted to write a mystery story that had something to do with stalkers. There was this new thing on phones: text messaging. Social media was just starting to come out too. So the idea of an A [an anonymous, all-knowing, stalker-slash-villain] came from there.
I had a neighbor growing up, a woman my mom's age, who'd been kidnapped when she was a teenager. I think my mom was fascinated [by kidnappings]. She was always coming to me to whisper, "Did you know [the neighbor] was kidnapped when she was young?" Then I moved to Philly and had another friend who had also been kidnapped [as a child], and she never really talked about it. So I was always afraid of being kidnapped. I remember thinking, What happens when somebody takes you? What happens next?
The eponymous first novel was published in October 2006 and became insanely popular: Over 1 million copies of the first seven books in the series were sold before the eighth hit shelves. From the start, Alloy planned to produce a television series alongside the books and brought in a number of writers to put together a PLL pilot. I. Marlene King, then best known as the screenwriter of beloved 1995 coming-of-age film Now and Then, took a crack at it.
I. Marlene King (Pretty Little Liars showrunner): I had a general meeting at ABC Family [now known as Freeform]. They were all fans of Now and Then, and by the end of the meeting, they said, "Hey, we have this book we have the rights to." I read it the next day, in one sitting, and I was totally hooked. I clearly saw what the pilot was supposed to be in my mind.
Shepard: When I read Marlene's pilot, I was really surprised because it was the whole first book in the first episode. I wondered, Where is this going to go?
King: Sara Shepard writes these great OMG, WTF cliffhanger chapter endings. I decided that if we could end each one of our episodes in a way that Sara ended her chapters — that was the tone I set out to accomplish. I knew the book fans would follow the material to television.
The first challenge was finding five young women to play the Liars of the title: Alison, the conniving kidnapping victim; Spencer, the impulsive, type-A intellectual; Hanna, the popularity-craving social climber; Emily, the athlete figuring out her sexuality; and Aria, the writer with wanderlust.
King: We saw hundreds of people. I give Gayle Pillsbury, our casting director, a lot of credit for building this dynamic ensemble. [Executive producer] Bob Levy [who produced the CW's Gossip Girl] was with Alloy at the time. He had also produced [the CW's] Privileged with Lucy Hale. We immediately thought she would make a great Aria.
Lucy Hale (Aria): I'd heard of the books and had a feeling that the show would be something special. I'll never forget the first time Marlene and I sat down to have coffee and talk about the project. I was instantly drawn to it.
King: At first, she was interested in playing Hanna.
Hale: I was very intrigued by Aria but I also loved Hanna; that type of character was one I hadn't tackled before.
King: We started [pairing] her with some different guys for chemistry reads and that's when she realized she really wanted to be Aria. She was the first person we cast. She didn't have to audition because she already had a big following.
Troian Bellisario (Spencer): I was pretty certain that I wasn't right for Spencer. In my heart, I felt in line with her, but in the book, she was a blonde-haired, green-eyed, all-American girl next door. There was no way they were going to cast me. The scene I auditioned with was her sneaking out of dinner with her family to smoke a cigarette with her sister's fiancé, which ended up not being in the pilot because it was too risqué!
King: Troian came in with no makeup on and delivered a great performance. We were like, "You've gotta come in and own it as a Pretty Little Liar." She came back with her hair and makeup done, very stylish, with this tuxedo jacket on, and tight pants, and does this scene. She turns around, and drops the jacket, and is wearing a scoop shirt that goes all the way down to the small of her back, and whips out the cigarette. It was amazing. I was like, This woman knows who Spencer Hastings is.
Bellisario: Truthfully, I don't know how to do my own hair and makeup. I was 23 at the time, just out of theater school. I went with the way that I do my makeup — foundation and blush — and straightened my hair. The note back from the network was, "Can you tell her to actually do her hair and her makeup?" And I was like, "…I did." I spent a long time doing my hair and makeup.
Shay Mitchell (Emily): Originally I'd come in to read for Spencer. When I auditioned for [Emily] and found out I landed it, I read the book on a flight and couldn't put it down.
King: We had a really hard time finding Emily. We saw two [actors] on videotape, and I was inclined to go with the other person. But in the room, Shay just owned the character of Emily. She changed our minds in the room and got the role.
We read Sasha for the role of Hanna and loved her. Then the night before she was going to go test at the studio, we found out that she was 12! And we thought, child labor laws … you can only work with minors for a very short day. But we knew for the first couple seasons, Alison would only be in flashbacks. Which is such a great dynamic, because she's always been the youngest, but the chemistry she has with the girls — so poised and such a dramatic presence onscreen ... She really was an authority figure to these girls in real life.
Sasha Pieterse (Alison): [Alison] reminded me a lot of Regina George on steroids. Ali is so intricate. There are so many layers to her. She contradicts herself. She always had to make it seem like she had this great life and really she was very troubled.
King: I think Ashley [Benson] was the last person we cast. By then, we really wanted one of the four original Liars, excluding Alison, to be blonde. We couldn't find anybody that felt right. Ashley was on a show called Eastwick. It was canceled at 8 a.m. on a Monday; the next morning, we had her in our casting offices. She was literally crying in the office because she just found out her show got canceled.
She knows how to use those "PLL big eyes," I call them. We knew we had our Hanna.
Production started in 2010. Lesli Linka Glatter, director of Now and Then and a TV vet (Mad Men, The West Wing, Twin Peaks) directed the pilot. Mandi Line, best known at the time for her work on Greek, came on as the costume designer. ABC Family invested in a massive advertising campaign to build buzz for the new series. Posters showed the stars dolled up and covered in dirt, with Lucy Hale posing with the series' soon-to-be-signature "Shh."
King: The network put a lot of money into the marketing campaign. Their team put that idea together — the dirt and the graves and Rosewood in the distance — and it really stuck. For the first season, many people thought the show was called Dirty Little Liars.
Hale: [My] shushing the camera was actually a spur-of-the-moment idea that happened to make the final cut.
Mandi Line (costume designer): I watched the pilot and went, "Oooooh shit." This was perfect timing! Sex and the City was done. Gossip Girl was just phasing out. I could see this pocket of time for new fashion and pushing the boundaries in high school. Gossip Girl did it but their budget was so high. I wanted to do something groundbreaking like that, but obtainable.
King: It's heightened reality but the clothes they wear, you can buy at the mall. As the time, Gossip Girl was a big hit, and we were like: We are not Gossip Girl. We want to be grounded in a way that people between New York and L.A. could relate to.
Bellisario: Our show starts out saying, "Hey, if you liked Gossip Girl, you'll like this!" But over time, you get to say, "Just kidding, we're actually trying to do Twin Peaks for teens, and we can be as weird and dark as we like."
The first Pretty Little Liars episode premiered June 8, 2010, and was watched by almost 2.5 million people.
Pieterse: Someone recognized me through the window at a restaurant before [the premiere] aired! I think she was a big fan of the book and probably researched who had gotten the part. That was the point where I was like, "OK, this might really be something."
Ian Harding (Ezra): After the show aired, I was walking through the farmers' market at the Grove [in Los Angeles] and was actually accosted by several teenage girls … It was one of these things like, "Oh! I guess it has some reach."
Pieterse: To be able to connect with our fans instantaneously [on Twitter], all over the world, really helped us. We could keep in touch with them and learn why they fell in love with the show. We ended up really writing for them, which I think is very unusual. Marlene decided to connect with the fans and really respected their feedback.
Because the series aired on ABC Family, a subsidiary of Disney, it was initially unclear just how dark (and sexy) the series could be.
King: At the time, we thought the pilot fairly daring for ABC Family: We have Emily and Maya, who are gay, and Maya was smoking weed. The biggest debate was [over] Wren smoking a cigarette! It's an overall Disney policy: They don't like to show people smoking. But they allowed us to let him put out the cigarette butt in a plant holder. That was the most daring thing we did.
Hale: TV is funny because you can't see anyone smoking a cigarette … but you can see a girl making out with her teacher.
Pieterse: The most descriptive [the network's notes get] is with sex scenes. There are clauses about sideboob and how much back you can show, how much leg you can show, and movement ... [pause] ... I don't want to get too graphic.
King: Our first Halloween special … Alison tells this creepy story about this twin murdering her sister, and the thing was, "You can't show blood." We pushed back and said, "We can show blood." So to go from that to chopping off Noel Kahn's head … that's pretty far.
Harding: Noel Kahn's head rolling down the steps! I thought that was amazing but it wasn't nearly as bloody as in the script, which I think said, "We see the blood forming little cascades," like something out of Saw. It ended up being what was obviously a prop severed head.
King: I want to say we had some debates about music over the first couple of seasons. The network thought some songs were just too adult. I remember the first time we had a Lana Del Rey song, it was in a [Spencer and Toby] scene, and they were like, "I don't know about that," but the fans loved it. We're always pushing the envelope with our sexy-time scenes.
At the center of PLL was a shadowy, all-powerful, violent, anonymous stalker, A, whose threats bring Emily, Spencer, Aria, and Hanna back together after Ali's disappearance. A knows the Liars' most humiliating, intimate, and incriminating secrets, and blackmails the girls into submission. A even threatens the Liars' lives; this attacker (or attackers) has a particular fondness for trying to run the girls over with a car. The writers and crew needed to create and design a character that could be any person — or people — anywhere, at any time.
Janel Parrish (Mona): The mystery is what made people talk about [the show]: Is Alison alive or dead? If she's dead, who killed her? Who is A? The writers were masters, raising more questions and keeping the viewers on their toes for years.
Jakub Durkoth (production designer, seasons 3–7): Up against these girls is this omnipotent, omniscient A, billionaire A, who has millions of henchmen that do her bidding, that are building these huge underground bunkers for her. I always wondered what contractor would build that stuff for them. That was never really answered.
King: We knew the original A would be Mona. I was bombarded with tweets that said, "You can do anything you want but don't change who A is." I never forgot that. I really believed the original A had to be Mona — but we had to do that in a way that still surprises the fans of the books. I knew who our show's A would be at the end — who we haven't revealed yet — but I didn't know we'd have Little A in between that.
Line: I swear to god, it took Marlene and me literally six seasons to figure out how to dress A properly — because we never knew who A was! All we knew was that [the costumes] had to hide everything and be unisex. It didn't have anything to do with fashion. You'd walk into the wardrobe trailer and on the whole left side was black hoodies in every size you can think of, black Levis 501s in every size, just a row of trial-and-error As. We had to make the hood extra deep, because you get an actor with a bigger head or nose. We had to add curves, because one of our As was a boy. We had to add hip pads.
Durkoth: There are [hidden] As everywhere [in the set]. The whole set, sometimes, would be shaped as an A. We tried to incorporate that as much as logistically possible. Sometimes the floor plan would be shaped like an A; the rafters could be an A; sometimes we'd create a shadow from those rafters shaped like an A, to create an A on the ground.
Bellisario: Every single one of the girls tried to convince [the writers] that they should be A for a while.s
Harding: This is when I really started to suspect that A either worked for or generally was the CIA: In season two, they're all having breakfast at school, and Emily pours out a cereal box, and it's all As. And I was like, "God, who has the time to contact the manufacturer, make sure that that one specific little box just comes, and then she strategically places it for Emily to walk through the line and pick up that box?" That is genius, and obviously impossible.
Parrish: For a while I was thinking, "Oh, it's one of the parents!" That it was Hanna or Alison's mom. On this show, everyone is a suspect at some point. What if all the parents were in on it?
Harding: I've also heard the theory that in the end, we find out it's all made up. I will not dispel that rumor. I remember there being a heated, dead-serious conversation with Keegan Allen [who plays Toby] about whether or not it's all an illusion, or if it's one of them chained to a bed in Radley, and this was all a horrible nightmare that he or she had.
In the midst of all the murder, the Liars found time to get entangled into plenty of romantic relationships — many ill-advised, some illegal. Aria, then underage, started the series by hooking up with her English teacher, Ezra Fitz; Spencer spent the pilot making out with her older sister's fiancé. You get the idea.
King: We knew that [Ezra and Aria] had wonderful chemistry, but we didn't realize right away that Hanna and Caleb would have that great chemistry, or Spencer and Toby. You write the scenes and you wait to see what happens. It's apparent to us, and usually apparent to the fans.
Bellisario: Toby actually committed suicide in the second book, very early on. So we brought in this character and there was talk of, "Would the story go that route?" But the audience loved him so much — they wanted to keep him around.
Mitchell: I think [Marlene] took the fans' opinions on who they liked and directed it toward that. Because let me tell you, if she didn't do that, she would hear about it.
Hale: I immediately thought [the Ezra/Aria relationship] was super sexy. There is something about a forbidden romance that draws people to it. It had a little Romeo and Juliet vibe at certain points.
Harding: One company dropped its advertising for our show in one of the early seasons, because they didn't agree with the relationship. And I was like, "No shit, our relationship is illegal!" And Marlene said, "No, it's not yours, it's Emily's relationship [that's the problem]." So I could be seen as a statutory rapist, and people are like, "I know, but love knows no bounds, as long as there is a penis and a vagina involved."
Mitchell: When I first started the show, I always got the question, "How does it feel to play a lesbian, to kiss another girl, to come out?" Because we were one of the first shows that tackled that, I love the fact that the character that I play had a positive impact on a lot of people. I encountered that time and time again, when fans would say Emily helped them bridge into the [coming out] conversation with friends and family.
Pieterse: Alison's love choices were not the best. Her husband literally put her in an insane asylum and was trying to kill her.
Mitchell: My character was falling for someone who tried to drown her at one point.
Parrish: Out of all of them, I would probably say Spencer [has the worst taste in romantic partners]. How many times did she steal her sister's boyfriend? One of them tried to kill her!
Over seven years, Pretty Little Liars took more than a few detours into some very absurd territory. Rosewood, technically a suburb of Philadelphia, existed in a magical land with no seasons and was lousy with incompetent (although very attractive) police officers. Not ideal for a town where people have a way of getting murdered all the time. Rosewood High had no dress code, and also apparently no attendance or graduation requirements. And where did A find someone to build that Dollhouse? Don't worry about it.
Durkoth: I created a little box that hung on the wall in the art department. If you asked a logic question, you had to put a dollar in it.
Line: They never go to class. They always have coffee dates and breakfast. I'd be like, "Marlene, did they go to school?" "Not yet!" "What time is it?" "1 p.m.!" The absurdity trickles into every department. If someone said about Aria, "That skirt is a little short," I would say, "She sleeps with her English teacher."
Harding: I love the fact that they're supposed to be like, "We're so exhausted; we're being hunted and harassed, and are vaguely suspicious of the cops due to one thing that happened in the second season … so we're never going to go to them."
Parrish: We just joked about the fact that every cop that we've had on the show has been bad in some way. What the hell, Rosewood?
Line: Some writers and directors were way more conservative. You'd have one director say, "In this scene, we have to make sure they have sensible shoes." And all the heads of the departments would be like, "Good luck with that one." [Once,] Hanna was visiting Mona in the institute, and one of her lines was, "OK, guys, I'm going in," and one of the writers was like, "…to a club, obviously."
Hale: They were always dressed to the nines at school. And always running in the woods in heels.
Bellisario: We live in Pennsylvania but there's never been snow except for the Christmas episode.
Line: Marlene would always say, "Mandi, do you know what city this takes place in?" And I would say, "L.A.?" It takes place in Pittsburgh or something? To this day, I still don't know where it takes place.
Harding: I wonder if we secretly paved the way for the Trump administration. Because it's just about what you want to believe at all times and ignoring the obvious truths, and people just go with you for seven years on that. There are so many times of, like, Go to the police! Don't make this more difficult than it needs to be! It's all about misinformation and a complete lack of logic. We just saturated the United States with it. I think we're secretly to blame for the current president.
The first of the final eight episodes premieres April 18. Now that production has officially wrapped, the cast and crew are starting to take stock of what the show meant to them, and why it captivated so many fans for so many years.
King: Somehow, we've managed to keep people interested in a mystery about a dead girl who turns out not to be dead.
Harding: It has all the nice, soapy elements. You've got love that cannot be, you've got a bunch of attractive people and great fashion. But on top of that, you have something else that I was really proud of: a show where the lead actresses were all able to be funny and intelligent and engage in in-depth discussions and fend for themselves ... They did all get kidnapped, at some point.
Parrish: This show is about badass girls. It's a very powerful, women-driven cast. Their friendship is really what gets them through everything. Four girls who would do anything for each other — it was very empowering to be a part of a show like that.
King: Ultimately, their challenges brought them closer together, season by season. That unconditional love that the girls have for each other, that can't go away, or the show will fail.
Hale: Aside from the drama, the scandal, and the mystery, at the root of the show is a story about true friendship.
Landing image courtesy of Eric McCandless/Disney ABC Television Group/Getty Images; Randy Holmes/Disney ABC Television Group/Getty Images; Disney ABC Television Group.
