TV Review - Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists

This is the spin-off of the hit series Pretty Little Liars, which premiered in 2010 and ran for seven seasons. The series was based on novels by Sara Shepard. The novels were adapted by I. Marlene King who became the show-runner. The premise was a group of high school girls who all have shady things that they've done who then get blackmailed via paper notes or text messages. It was like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) meets Mean Girls (2004). It was well done and had pretty good twists and turns. Those twists and turns did get crazy. For this spin-off, two of the characters from that previous series have moved to a new environment and are surrounded by new and younger characters. Despite the new characters, if you compare the first episode of this spin-off with the first episode of the previous series, they're virtually identical in terms of structure and some of the dynamics.

Sasha Pieterse (Pretty Little Liars) reprises her role as Alison DiLaurentis, the girl who was at the center of the previous series' mystery. She was the queen bee of her school in Rosewood, Pennsylvania. She was the quintessential "mean girl," a blonde bombshell. She was believed to be dead, which started the chain of events in the previous series. Those events though changed her. As we meet her again, she is now a faculty member at Beacon Heights University. She's a teacher's assistant, not quite a professor yet, but she teaches English literature. She meets three of her students who become involved with a murder. Given the parallels to what happened to her and her friends in the previous series, Alison decides to help her students solve the murder.

Eli Brown plays Dylan Walker, an aspiring musician who specializes in playing the cello. He's gay and is dating an architect student named Andrew, played by Evan Bittencourt. Sydney Park plays Caitlin Lewis, a woman of color whose field of study isn't exactly defined, but she's notably the daughter of a lesbian politician. Sofia Carson plays Ava Jalali, an app designer who aspires to work at Vogue magazine. Of the three students, Ava is the one whose family isn't wealthy or high-class enough for the elite society that is the focus here. Aside from being in Alison's class, the only connection between Dylan, Caitlin and Ava is one guy.

Chris Mason plays Nolan Hotchkiss, the ultimate spoiled brat. He's this series' mean girl. He lives in the lap of luxury and you think he has it all. It's clear though that his manipulative attitude comes from the fact that he has a very domineering and controlling snob of a mother named Claire Hotchkiss, played by Kelly Rutherford (Gossip Girl and Melrose Place). She controls him, so he acts out by being super-controlling over others, including over Dylan, Caitlin and Ava. How he does so is mostly by blackmailing them.

The exception is Ava. Nolan claims to be in love with Ava. However, he knows that his mother will never except Ava because she's not high-class enough for his mother. Therefore, he secretly dates Ava and pretends that Caitlin is his actual girlfriend. Caitlin has a boyfriend named Jeremy, played by Graeme Thomas King. In order to get Caitlin to pretend to be his girlfriend, Nolan blackmails her with the fact that her lesbian politician-mom is having an affair with a man. Nolan also blackmails Dylan into doing his homework or other assignments. In order to get Nolan to do whatever he wants, Nolan blackmails him with the fact that Dylan cheated on Andrew. The twist is that Dylan cheated on Andrew with Nolan himself.

The first episode ends with Nolan being pushed off a roof and being impaled on a spiked fence. The head of security at the university is Dana Booker, played by Klea Scott. She suspects that either Dylan, Caitlin or Ava as being the one who pushed Nolan off the roof, killing him. As she pursues them, they have to find who the real murderer is. At the same time, someone has learned about the secrets Nolan was using to blackmail them. This unknown person is using those secrets to toy with the three students. This unknown person is either the actual killer and is trying to implicate or frame them or the unknown person thinks that one of them killed Nolan and is trying to intimidate or trip them up somehow.

If this unknown person is the actual killer, then the plot would be a modern version of I Know What You Did Last Summer. The likelihood is that the unknown person won't turn out to be the killer, which is how things played out in the previous series. So far, the show has teased two possible candidates for the unknown blackmailer. The first is Mason Gregory, played by Noah Gray-Cabey (Code Black and Heroes), the ex-boyfriend of Caitlin and devotee of Nolan. The other candidate is Taylor Hotchkiss, played by Hayley Erin (General Hospital and The Young and the Restless). Taylor is Nolan's sister who like Alison faked her death.

Even though I didn't really watch the previous series, it does feel like a good continuation of what the previous series was. It also feels like a lighter and watered-down version of How To Get Away With Murder. It has a similar kind of sexy appeal as that series that also focused on college students linked to a killing and their teacher who works to protect them. The third episode here though killed the momentum of the first two episodes, which doesn't inspire confidence that this show will have the same kind of energy and power as How To Get Away With Murder, but this series is somewhat addictive.

Rated TV-14-VLSD.
Running Time: 1 hr.
Wednesdays at 8PM on Freeform.