Max’s Pretty Little Liars pulled out all the stops during the season 2 finale — and the show is just getting started.
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, creators Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Lindsay Calhoon Bring reflected on those big narrative swings, their plans for future seasons and even weighed in on how the smaller episode count affected season 2.
Warning: This story contains spoilers about the Pretty Little Liars: Summer School season 2 finale.
“In season 1, we were introducing all the girls and we were getting them to become friends. So the extra two episodes really, really helped us slow the story down a little bit and build the girls’ friendship,” Aguirre-Sacasa said of Season 2’s shortened run. “The good thing about season 2 is they’re already friends and we already know them.”
Bring agreed that having an “established” world greatly benefited the sophomore season.
“I don’t think there’s any way we could have done less than 10 episodes during season 1, given that we had five leads to introduce to form relationships to tell a satisfying story,” Bring noted. “For season 2, I think we had the exact right runway to tell those stories and to make them lean and mean. And the beauty of a shorter episode season is it’s all killer or no filler. There’s not a skippable episode. We don’t make skippable episodes.”
The Pretty Little Liars reboot, which debuted on Max in 2022, picked up where the original series left off by introducing Imogen (Bailee Madison), Tabby (Chandler Kinney), Faran (Zaria), Mouse (Malia Pyles) and Noa (Maia Reficco) as they get tormented by a murderous stalker named A. During the season 1 finale, the girls discovered that Angela’s (Gabriella Pizzolo) brother Archie was behind the murders.
The second season raised the stakes even higher by introducing a new villain named Bloody Rose — who turned out to be Mrs. Langsberry (Carey Van Driest) and her accomplice Wes (Derek Klena). Throughout season 2 — known as Pretty Little Liars: Summer School — the main friend group tried to enjoy their time off despite the threats coming at them from every direction.
“Given our genre, I think we talked about [potential episodes] like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to do a found footage episode where Tabby’s filming an episode in the woods?'” Bring reflected on the ideas that didn’t make the final cut. “Or we have this spooky spaghetti franchise. … I love an internet-based horror movie and thought that would be so fun to do. So you lose a little bit of the playfulness. But it wasn’t a challenge to make sure if we get eight episodes that we need to make sure that everything is plotted out well and that everyone is fully represented. So there is a fun challenge to it as well.”
Keep scrolling for Aguirre-Sacasa and Bring’s insight on that shocking Pretty Little Liars season 2 finale — and what comes next:
Was Bloody Rose’s Reveal Meant to Parallel ‘Scream 2’?
Mrs. Langsberry took on the Bloody Rose persona as a way of seeking revenge for her son, Chip Langsberry (Carson Rowland), who was murdered by Archie after Imogen and Tabby realized Chip was the one who sexually assaulted them. Horror film fan Wes aidedLangsberry in her plot, which felt like a throwback to Nancy Loomis (Laurie Metcalf) and Mickey (Timothy Olyphant) taking on the role of Ghostface during the second Scream installment.
“I’ve definitely seen Scream 2. I think Lindsay has probably seen it more than me. It’s funny because for us, this was a sequel series. The sequel that I think inspired us the most was Friday the 13th Part 2,” Aguirre-Sacasa explained. “In Friday the 13th Part 1, Jason’s mother was the killer and then in part 2 it was Jason. For us, our season 1 villain was Archie and then our season 2 villain was Archie’s mother.”
Aguirre-Sacasa, however, could see the connection to the iconic slasher franchise, adding, “Scream is a horror movie. And it’s funny because some shows have one horror movie fanatic. We have Tabby, Christian, Wes and Chip as horror movie fanatics. So it does feel like there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy to all of this.” (It is also important to note that Wes Craven was the original director of the Scream franchise.)
The writers’ room had fun finding ways to nod at “sequel tropes” in horror throughout the season.
“If we were really doing Scream 2, we probably would’ve had it being Mrs. Langsberry and Tabby’s boyfriend, Christian. But it definitely is funny,” she shared. “The thing that we were so focused on was Friday the 13th Part 2 because of summer horror and because of that inversion of Archie and Bloody Rose.”
Did They Always Know the Identities of the Killers?
“Truthfully, we didn’t know it was going to be Wes and Mrs. Langsberry until we’d probably written six of the episodes,” Bring told Us. “Roberto says that the best thing possible is to leave the door open. Leave the door open for as long as you can in a mystery show because the killer will reveal themselves. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Wes was nearly on the chopping block before the story turned toward him being one of the villains.
“As far as episode 6, we planned to kill Wes. We actually were going to have Mrs. Langsberry kill him at The Orpheum. We wrote the scene and then we found ourselves — like Tabby — writing every character on our murder board, drawing lines between them, their connections, their history, their past,” Bring continued. “And we thought, ‘Mrs. Langsberry and Wes are connected. This could make a lot of sense.’ They really revealed themselves as the right killers to us kind of at the 11 o’clock hour.”
What Inspired the Decision to Kill Dr. Sullivan?
Throughout season 2, characters and viewers alike were trying to make sense of Dr. Sullivan’s (Annabeth Gish) motivations. It wasn’t until the finale that Dr. Sullivan confirmed she wasn’t looking out for the girls.
“It felt right. We knew we needed a horror tag. One of the joys of season 2 was working with Annabeth but that said — Dr. Sullivan was shady. She did have a tragic backstory but she did secretly record the girls and all this other stuff. When we were talking about a horror tag, we thought, ‘The girls’ trauma story is over, so probably they’re no longer going to see Dr. Sullivan,'” Aguirre-Sacasa explained. “It did feel like you want the audience to feel like she kind of got her comeuppance. It just felt a little delicious and rich in all the right ways. And ultimately [her death was] tragic in that she never finds out the truth about her son’s murder.”
Despite Dr. Sullivan having ties to the original Pretty Little Liars series, Bring said it was important to follow the story to a natural conclusion.
“We had to look at her character in this show and write without fear and know what gives her the best ending. Dr. Sullivan had a couple of different motives in coming to Millwood,” she detailed. “And one of them was her tragic backstory of losing her son and her trying to find an answer to something that she never gets.”
Bring added: “We thought it was really satisfying and tragic as a horror ending. And I think someone can be a couple of things. She could be someone who does care about the girls but herself is self-serving and she’s been through a lot. She might as well try to profit off of it.”
Expanding the Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa Universe: From ‘Riverdale’ to ‘CAOS’
Before bringing the Pretty Little Liars reboot to life, Aguirre-Sacasa was the mastermind behind Riverdale and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the dark reboots set in the formerly squeaky-clean Archie Comics universe. PLL has referenced Aguirre-Sacasa’s past work — but that doesn’t mean there will be a crossover across the various fictional worlds.
“First of all, I love all that inner connectivity. Everyone who works on these shows, I’m just a fan. So anytime that happens is great. I will say that I am not at all responsible for the Kevin [and] Greg relationship that appeared in a script [this season],” Aguirre-Sacasa confirmed. “It, of course, delighted me and I laughed and was like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever.’ But I think that was a Lindsay elaboration that was just fun. I think it justifies itself just in what it is.”
Their Crossover Wishlist
Aguirre-Sacasa pitched a crossover between Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl.
“They’re both in the Alloy Entertainment universe. That would truly write itself where either the PLL girls take a day trip to New York or the Gossip Girl characters are coming back from the Hamptons and they find themselves trapped in Millwood on the worst night of the year,” he joked. “That would be amazing. They’re also both such incredible casts and I love that they’re in this extended Alloy universe. So that would be a dream crossover.”
Bring isn’t ruling out potentially building to “a bigger universe.”
“Tabby says [a line about] shades of Gossip Girl season 2. We like to have fun with it and we like to have color. There is a lot of crossover in all of these types of shows but that big crossover is the audience,” Bring pointed out. “Our audience is the same audience that loves Riverdale, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. There’s a lot of connectivity between all these shows and there’s just a lot of fun in connecting them.”
She added, “Any real story and character connectivity that we would be reaching out to would be within the Pretty Little Liars universe as we like to say — much like a Dr. Sullivan character.”
The Next Villains to Watch Out For
The season 2 finale hinted at what villain to look out for next season, featuring several scenes of a menacing group wearing masks representing each Liar. Aguirre-Sacasa and Bring broke down the intention behind that sequence after the finale aired.
“It’s a tease and Lindsay and I love evil doppelgängers. We obviously love Jordan Peele‘s movies and Us has the greatest doppelgängers in history and, obviously, there were masks. The PLL OG franchise had a lot of masks in it as well. So it’s an homage to all of that,” Aguirre-Sacasa explained. “And whether those girls are the characters in Tabby’s movie that she’s making in season 3 or whether they are a weird splinter offshoot of the fundamentalist teams from Redemption House — we’re just putting it out there as this is something that could be explored in a potential season 3.”
Bring expressed excitement for future story lines as well.
“One of the things for us was we liked the idea of having many villains still out there. Archie is still out there, Wes is alive, Mrs. Langsberry is alive, Principal Clanton is still in prison. We like to think they’re all sharing a cell,” she quipped. “These characters are really, really fun teases. I do love an A, B, C. I love a season 1 Archie. I love a Bloody Rose season 2 and I love a copycat. So TBD.”
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School is currently streaming on Max.
