Surprise, Pretty Little Liars fans! ABC Family has gone ahead and renewed the hit drama for a fifth season! “But, wait,” you ask. “Didn’t the third season just air its finale last week?” That’s right, and the fourth season won’t premiere until June…. if this doesn’t show network faith in the much buzzed about series, then I don’t know what does.
“Our viewers have an incredible ability to amplify messages and create buzz around things that interest them, including our shows and talent,” ABC President Michael Riley said in a statement. “In fact, during the season three finale, our viewers made Pretty Little Liars the first series episode to amass over 1 million total airtime Tweets in TV history, accounting for one-third of all Twitter activity in the hour.
It doesn’t stop there, either.
Riley has also greenlit Ravenswood, a one-hour drama spinoff series which will premiere after the annual Liars Halloween episode in October. From the executive producers of PLL, I. Marlene King, Oliver Goldstick, Joseph Dougherty and Leslie Morgenstein, Ravenswood will center on a town that is “not far” from Rosewood, Pennsylvania.
The spinoff will tell the tale of Ravenswood, a town that “has suffered under a deadly curse for generations.” The series will follow five strangers who suddenly find themselves connected by this fatal curse and need to dig into the town’s mysterious and terrible history before it’s too late for each of them.
“Pretty Little Liars is brand-defining and demo-defining for ABC Family. We are proud to be able to grow the PLL franchise in two ways – both by adding additional seasons of the original and by extending the storytelling into a spin-off. Ravenswood will become another ‘must-tweet-TV’ series for us,” said Riley.
Fans of Liars won’t have to wait too long to see what happens next as the series is set to return on June 11th where we’ll finally, hopefully learn if Allison is really alive and who’s in the trunk of the police car. (My money is on Jason.)
