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 upgrade to 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 downloads 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.
Toby's mom's age
Flashbacks are a notoriously tricky tool to use in a long-running TV show, as they're easy to contradict in later episodes. Pretty Little Liars fell prey to this issue, as Toby's mom (Marion Cavanaugh) was shown to be one age in a flashback with Alison and another age in a later flashback.
In the first flashback, Alison meets Toby's mom while they're both teenagers. Then, in a later flashback, Charlotte DiLaurentis witnesses Marion's passing while she was still a kid. The issue here is that Charlotte is Alison's older sister, so this makes the two flashbacks fundamentally impossible. There is no way they can both be accurate, leaving fans to doubt how old Toby's mom was when she actually perished.
Ezra's notes on Aria are wrong
Ezra Fitz has several creepy qualities about him, foremost of which is that he's a grown man who dated multiple girls, but one of these traits is that he "thoroughly" researched the Liars. He kept notes on them, but these notes have an error about Aria of all people, the Liar he knows best.
Ezra's notes say Aria spent three years in Iceland with her family, when she only lived there for one. This may seem like a simple typo, but it damages Ezra's credibility, as Aria couldn't have been friends with the Liars if she'd been in Iceland for three full years. It doesn't make sense for the character to mess this up, so it must have been a production mistake.
Jenna’s tear switches sides after she’s slapped by Hanna
In the very first season of Pretty Little Liars, the Liars found a vicious adversary in Jenna, a rival popular girl at the high school. Jenna was manipulative and played people against one another, but she was also blind, and Hanna ruthlessly took advantage of that by slapping her when she wasn't expecting it.
However, it becomes clear that filming that scene required multiple takes and re-applications of makeup, as Jenna cried a single tear after getting slapped, but it switches sides between shots. You can clearly see it start on one side of her face, then magically switch to the other. This mistake wasn't obvious, but it robbed the scene of some of its power for those who did catch it.
Changing drinks
Pretty Little Liars sets a lot of its scenes in kitchens and cafes, and while this is perfectly fine in most ways it also leads to some specific continuity errors. In many scenes throughout the series, characters will be drinking from a glass that less liquid in one shot than it does in the next. The amount of liquid in the glasses changes frequently, and sometimes the entire drink vanishes in later shots.
There are too many of these scenes to count, so instead of us calling out Pretty Little Liars for these mistakes, we invite you to pay attention next time you see any movie or TV show with a scene that features drinks. Keep an eye on the level in the cup, because almost everybody messes this up.
AD’s handwriting changes
Every film and television production usually has multiple versions of important props in case of damage or just for convenience's sake, but it usually isn't a great idea to switch between props with subtle differences between shots in the same scene. Yet PLL did just that--multiple times--in season seven.
AD writes threatening messages several times in that season, and if you look very closely you can spot some places where her handwriting changes between shots. In the seventh episode, her message "I SEE YOU" has a subtle change, and in the 16th episode she writes "HERE LIES" on a tombstone in a comic book. Perplexingly, the director of the latter chose to focus in on the switch with a close-up, so it wasn't as hard to notice.
Mona’s magic makeup
Pretty much every character on PLL constantly has perfect makeup even when they logically wouldn't be wearing any. Multiple characters have maintained perfect eye makeup despite sobbing, but a particularly egregious example occurred in the tenth episode of season 6A, when Mona was crying after hearing a revelation about her past.
Mona's makeup smudges with her tears, and in the very next shot the smudges are gone and her eyes have perfect makeup once again. We're willing to suspend our disbelief a bit, to the Liars' extravagant outfits and makeup never seeming out of place despite emotions running high and situations demanding physical activity, but makeup magically fixing itself between shots is a bridge too far.
Sloppy green screen
Television budgets have never been the highest in the world, and on network television they don't tend to allow for high quality CGI. Pretty Little Liars ran into the problem a few different times over the course of the series, but we'll focus specifically on the tenth episode of season six.
This was a big, important episode, and the production team got perhaps a bit overambitious and had multiple scenes that required a green screen. Even if you can ignore the mediocre CGI on the large computer display, there's a baffling scene where Charlotte looks in on the Liars in the Brew, and the actress is obviously just looking at a green screen. The perspective of the shot is noticeably off, and anyone familiar with green screen can see it for what it is.
The misspelled algebra test
Pretty Little Liars prided itself on sticking in subtle jokes, clues, and references into the background of frames. If you look closely throughout the show, you'll find the letter A or other references to the plot in easy-to-miss places. Unfortunately, fans looking closely at these frames also means they're more likely to catch mistakes.
In Aria's algebra test in the 19th episode of season five, a handful of eagle-eyed viewers saw a reference to A, as a problem asked students to "Solve for A." However, even sharper-eyed fans also noticed that the word "population" was misspelled as "popopulation." Needless, to say, you shouldn't feel bad if you didn't spot this error.
The DiLaurentis family photoshops their photos
Sometimes production teams just phone it in. Instead of putting in extra work and getting actors together for a photoshoot, they just do a quick photoshop job and call it a day. Pretty Little Liars is far from the first to make this mistake, but a bad photoshop just isn't fun to look at.
The photo above is from the fourteenth episode of the fifth season of PLL, when Alison looks at family photos. The photo isn't on screen for long, so it was easy to miss for fans, but pausing it for even a second lets you see the uncanny effect on the family's heads. The actors' faces were clearly pasted on top of somebody else's photo, with lighting that doesn't match the background and at awkward angles. The ski gear is pasted on top of that, too.
It isn’t accurate to Pennsylvania
The fictional town of Rosewood, where the entirety of Pretty Little Liars is set, is supposedly part of Pennsylvania. But even if you can ignore the blatantly inaccurate climate of the Liars' hometown, there are other ways that the show doesn't stay true to its ostensible home.
Aside from maybe the weather the mistakes are all minor, but they add up. Multiple cars appear with license plates on the front when Pennsylvania doesn't require that, nobody speaks with any Pennsylvania-specific accent or slang, and the writers don't seem to realize that Pennsylvania's wine industry is run by the state (almost all wine is sold from state-owned stores there, not private wineries like the Liars buy from). Eventually, all this just demonstrates that the show couldn't actually be set in the state.
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What other mistakes did you catch in Pretty Little Liars? Let us know in the comments!