Pretty Little Liars is a unique show in the landscape of modern television-- one of the few that has ever really understood the relationship between teenage girls, technology, and emotional manipulation. First debuting in 2010 and finally coming to a close in 2017, Pretty Little Liars boasted an ensemble cast that drew fans in for its whole run. Jumpstarting the careers of Lucy Hale, Troian Bellisario, Shay Mitchell, Ashley Benson, Sasha Pieterse, and Janel Parrish, the show was both popular and influential.
None of that means it was perfect, however. Pretty Little Liars ran for seven seasons, and there are always mistakes and goofs when a show goes that long. This list takes on all the mistakes that fans might have missed when they were watching the show for the first time. Some of these errors are big and affect the entire canon of the show, but others are as small as a misplaced prop or unexplainable changes in set or costume design.
To clarify, we are not saying that all fans everywhere missed all of these mistakes, simply that these mistakes were subtle enough that they slipped by at least some viewers. Some weren't particularly hard to catch, and some took the most eagle-eyed fan to find them. And whether it was the writers contradicting established canon or directors getting sloppy or actors holding their phones wrong, none of them make PLL a bad show.
Did you catch any? Here are 20 Mistakes Fans Completely Missed In Pretty Little Liars.
The timeline
A constant refrain among critics and fans who have seen Pretty Little Liars is that the overall timeline doesn't make a lick of sense. For instance, did you know that the six seasons that take place before the time-skip tell the story of less than two years in the lives of the Liars?
The first three seasons of the show take place in less than two years, but the timeline gets especially crazy after that. The third, fourth, and most of the fifth seasons occur in the span of just two months, which means that the characters' lives change multiple times and there are tons of plot twists in just a few days. Don't even get us started on how the flashbacks to previous years can contradict and complicate one another.
Emily and Ali’s white daughters
Emily and Alison ended up together in a heartwarming conclusion to their tumultuous relationship, raising twin girls despite Alison's pregnancy initially being unwanted. While some fans were blinded by the girls' cuteness, there were some who noticed that they didn't much resemble Emily.
We won't get into the complexities of the pregnancy, but the twins were Emily's genetic daughters despite being birthed by Alison. Fans couldn't help but notice that Emily's girls were white and blonde, very far from Emily's physical makeup, as well their biological father, Wren Kingston. Instead, they looked more like Alison, who actually wasn't their biological mother. Whether this was bad casting or a misunderstanding of human reproduction, we can't say.
Alison’s old house
Iffy location continuity is hardly specific to PLL, as nearly every show struggles at some point to honor their previously established locations. But Alison DiLaurentis' old house goes above and beyond that standard, as seemingly everything about it is confusing. Even if you can keep track of which character owns it (several different people bought and sold it during the show's run), the house doesn't stay in one place.
Alison's house was next door to Emily's early on, and in later seasons it became next door to Spencer's family, but Emily and Spencer's houses aren't near to one another. If you can keep up with that logic, we'd love it if you could also explain how Alison's old house looks completely different in early seasons compared to later ones.
"Adrenalized hyper-reality" is a made up term
This is a mistake that sounded interesting but was ultimately pure nonsense. Mona Vanderwaal was the original A on Pretty Little Liars, as her obsession with the Liars propelled her to try to control their lives. The show explained this urge by saying she was living in an "adrenalized hyper-reality," in which they said she believed she was an omniscient god ruling over the girls.
Her "condition" was caused by her high intelligence and obsession, said the show. The problem is that this is all gibberish, pseudoscience that the writers clearly made up on the spot to try to explain Mona. There's no such thing as an "adrenalized hyper-reality" in psychology, and everything about it is fabricated.
The weather is too nice for Pennsylvania
One of the side effects of the writers and designers of Pretty Little Liars wanting to dress the characters in the most stylish costumes possible is that the majority of the costumes wouldn't do well in extreme weather. This led to Pretty Little Liars episodes taking place virtually exclusively in the spring and fall.
You could count the episodes of PLL that feature snow on one hand, and still have fingers left over. Since the show is set in Pennsylvania, a state that gets plenty of snowfall, this doesn't have any basis in logic. The wonky timeline plays into this as well: it's almost like the show's writers forgot that winter and summer existed.
The Liars’ phone cases
Pretty Little Liars was one of the first shows to really understand how social media and phones affected the development of teenage girls in the modern age, and this manifested in how it developed much of its plot through texting and phone calls. One downside to this, though, was that with phones on screen all the time, the show was ripe for phone-related continuity mistakes.
It wasn't just the model of the phones or the way the Liars used them, but also the phone cases. Fashion and accessories are a huge part of PLL, but we don't think the Liars are such obsessive fashionistas that they change phone cases in the same episode. There are a ton of instances of this in the show, as the Liars' phone cases are anything but constant.
Anachronistic technology
There are a lot of elements of PLL that make no sense thanks in part to the odd timeline. One of these is the technology in the show, as characters use phones and other devices that didn't exist in the canonical year of the story. The first six seasons take place from 2010 to 2012, but characters continually phones from 2013 and later.
Since the final seasons took place after a multi-year time-kip, they're somewhat exempt from these problems, but the first six have the Liars using phones like an iPhone 5S, which wasn't released until 2013. They also go from flip phones to smartphones over the course of these seasons, and certain characters randomly switch back and forth between old and new phones.
The Liars don't know how to make phone calls
As we've established, Pretty Little Liars is a show utterly reliant on smartphones. The problem here is that TV directors tend to have a laissez-faire attitude towards realism when having characters make phone calls, and this leads to a lot of continuity errors.
This usually manifests in viewers seeing characters' phones not actually being in call mode when they make a call, or the phone being off entirely. Actress Lucy Hale actually once called herself out after a specific episode, pointing out that she was holding her phone upside down. She actually posted to social media about it before any fans had taken notice, so fans really did completely miss this one.
Caleb’s hacking
Caleb (played by Tyler Blackburn) is an interesting character on PLL, and he becomes integral to much of the plot thanks to his hacking skills. He also becomes part of some of the biggest plot holes on the show for the same reason, as Pretty Little Liars never really understood how hacking worked.
Caleb went from torrenting illegal s to hacking the literal police department in less than a year, a puzzling jump that was never really explained. Aside from that character plot hole, pretty much every hack he did had no basis in reality. Here's a pretty typical example of hacking in PLL, and anyone who has ever learned how to code can tell it is obviously exaggerated for the screen.
The dubbing of "website page"
Pretty Little Liars was one of the first shows to really get how teenage girls interacted with technology and the internet, but that doesn't mean there weren't mistakes during filming. In the very first season of PLL, Aria does a quick internet background check on Ezra, and the clear implication is that she's checking his Facebook page.
In fact, you can see her mouth the words "Facebook page" on screen, but they were hastily dubbed over with the words "website page" in post. Creator I. Marlene King says this decision was made by ABC's legal department, so they wouldn't associate directly with the social media network. Instead, the character says the awkward phrase "website page." You know, like the kids do.