Photo: ABC Family
How Long Did We Enjoy Living In Ravenswood?
Even our teen drama-loving commentator felt out of place in the Pretty Little Liars spinoff.
New Show Attempted: Ravenswood.
Premise: Five teenagers from different walks of life have to figure out what's up with the kooky hamlet where they live -- "the only town in the country that doesn't have a website." MYSTERIOUS!
How Far I Expected To Get: Since it's a spinoff of Pretty Little Liars, one of the few shows for teenagers that I don't watch, I thought that even if it was competently made, it would probably not be for me, but I figured I could probably make it to the halfway point or so.
How Much I Watched
What Did It: The episode started to lose me with a conversation over coffee during which Remy (Britne Oldford), daughter of the editor of the local paper, tells newcomer Caleb (Tyler Blackburn, our connection to PLL) about Ravenswood's crazy history, which involves a catastrophic flood in 1896; tons of people were killed and the expectation was that Ravenswood would be deserted, but the townsfolk rebuilt, and the place...well, it didn't thrive, but it continued to exist, though not just as a town but as the location of ghost stories told in the surrounding area. Remy explains that this is why Caleb's story of finding a tombstone with his name and portrait on it that later disappeared doesn't faze her at all: "We have a different kind of 'ordinary' in this town." THIS IS TV-ONLY TALK that bears no resemblance to real life, but okay, fine, it's a campy teen paranormal noir. Then the episode kind of gets me back with a scene in which Caleb takes a bath and almost gets drowned by the water that won't turn off and/or suffocated by the plastic shower curtain by an unseen, spectral assailant, which at least has a little Final Destination-esque pizzazz.
But THEN (and I'm guessing at the actual broadcast time code because I watched a screener without commercials, but...somewhere around there): Remy is about to go out when she runs into her mother (Sophina Brown) making up the living-room couch to sleep on and hesitantly asks, "Mom, are you having nightmares again?" And then it hit me: this is just Under The Dome with more teens and less Dome! Same weird town where everyone weirdly just accepts what's going on; same assortment of violent crime between non-supernatural humans when clearly enough nutty shit is happening without average people having to add to it for the usual boring crime-show reasons; same unexplained phenomena that we shouldn't expect will ever get explained. Nice try, but I'm not falling for this bullshit! Not again!
Worth Taking A Run At It? It's a hard pass from me, but if you like Pretty Little Liars, I imagine you'll like this too.