Chandler Kinney and Maia Reficco are the new Pretty Little Liars in reboot by Riverdale creators
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin is set to air on HBO Max.
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Another “dark and gritty” reboot of a teen series in 2021? Color us shocked, surprised, bamboozled. Chandler Kinney (Zombies 2) and Maia Reficco (Kally’s Mashup, Strangers) will star in Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, from Riverdale and Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina writer Lindsay Calhoon Bring.
According to Deadline, the series description reads, “Twenty years ago, a series of tragic events almost ripped the blue-collar town of Millwood apart. Now, in the present day, a group of disparate teen girls, find themselves tormented and made to pay for the secret sin their parents committed two decades ago in addition to their own.”
Bring and Aguirre-Sacasa plan on taking the Sara Shepard book series to a new town and to a new set of teenage girls. Kinney will play Tabby, an aspiring director and horror movie buff with a secret. Reficco stars opposite as Noa, a striving, sardonic track star who’s looking to get her life back on course after spending the summer in juvenile detention.
Lucy Hale, Ashley Benson, Troian Bellisario, and Shay Mitchell, were the original Pretty Little Liars in the Freeform series, which ran from 2010-2017. Taking place in the town of Rosewood, the four high schoolers faced the constant threat of having their secrets revealed by an unidentified individual named “A.” The original liars encountered teacher-student relationships, intense familial drama, stalking, blackmail, and murder, so it’s unclear how the Riverdale creators plan on taking it up a notch, but they’ll figure it out.
Four years sounds like hardly enough time to garner desire for a reboot series, and we’re unsure who’s clamoring for the reboot of the knock-off Gossip Girl with the Gossip Girl reboot a mere week away, but go off, we guess.
1 Comment
What I find most intriguing with this reboot is what are the lessons it will take from the original. To me, PLL is in retrospect a fascinating fall of grace for a show, at least from a critical perspective, as it started as this provocative show that opposed certain narratives only to end up as almost a caricature of what it was where all the big character arcs were basically there to fawn to the core audience. Thus everyone ended up with their first loves, much more promising relationship dynamics were abandoned and some truly toxic actions were treated as romantic. I mean the Aria/Fitz thing was seriously beyond gross, but it wasn’t alone in its questionable decision.
So how the reboot deals with that legacy is something I am deeply interested in seeing.