It Will Be Hard

The showrunners of the hit ABC Family show Pretty Little Liars, Oliver Goldstick and Marlene King, revealed to The Hollywood Reporter what the hardest scene for them to write has been. It turns out both writers talked about scenes in PLL.

Oliver said: ” The reveal that Toby (Keegan Allen) was on ‘A’s’ team. He is my most favorite character on the show and I’ve said from the beginning that he is the moral compass. To then write that scene, where the black hoodie turns around and it’s Toby, it was like, “Oh my god!”

It was one of those things where you knew it had to be done, it was the right thing to do, but I knew with the way people reacted when Maya died that Toby fans were going to be devastated. A viewer’s mom called the show the day after the episode aired and said, “I need to speak to the head of television.”

Marlene said: “When Aria’s brother hits his mother. It was a, no pun intended, a tender scene. It was a story that someone had told his friend and it was a question of how far I could take it. The network was concerned too; they did not want to damage his character and make him unredeemable and unforgivable.

We had a whole arc of his depression; with teenagers, it’s very real but something we have to treat with some reverence. That to me was treacherous, it was potentially a minefield to walk through because you don’t want to trivialize something that is quite real and profound.”

I think both writers did fantastic jobs writing each of those scenes. When I look back on the three and a half seasons PLL has been on those are two of the scenes that still stick out to me.