Kat with a K

Pretty Little Liars 1.1: "Pilot"

The short version: I watched it. It wasn't very good. But I'll keep watching for a few weeks to give it a chance.

The slightly longer version: I wasn't particularly wild about the book, but I was hoping the show would be better. It wasn't. It was worse, and worse specifically in ways it diverged from the book. This is supposed to be soapy, but the characters on the show seemed much more wholesome than the book characters. There was no label-dropping and no sense of place. The characters were even more one-dimensional, but I'll give them a few episodes to see if they improve upon that. Much less time elapsed between Ali's disappearance and the beginning of the show than the corresponding events in the book, which makes sense because it would be much harder to film the flashback scenes if they had to make the characters look that much younger. But it also means that the characters had less time to change, and to grow apart, than they did in the book, and it made the whole thing less dramatic.

But the young actresses all did good jobs, and I am somewhat curious to see how everything turns out. So I'll keep watching for the moment. This show is really, really lucky that it's on during the summer: if I weren't in withdrawal from my favorite TV teens - those on Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries - I wouldn't bother with this.