In the latest installment of Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin – a spin-off of the 2010 Freeform show – the characters return to Rosewood, the town from the first series. There, the main characters learn that some of the patients from Rosewood’s Radley Sanitarium “were sent to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy over in Riverdale.”
Yes, the Riverdale! The Riverdale, which is the center of CW’s Riverdale, the show that gave a sober twist to the Archie cartoon characters. The show that started out as a standard crime thriller but then evolved into serial killers and cults and magical forces and alternate universes, with the final season ending with a comet hurtling toward the city, catapulting everyone back to the 1950s.
It’s official: The cult teen thriller Pretty Little Liars and the cult teen paranormal crime drama soap opera musical (?) Riverdale are now sharing a universe.
To be fair, the connection isn’t so much an intentional long scam, but executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s little Easter egg that ends up opening a whole box of peeps (trying to connect two metaphors here, be patient) . As Aguirre-Sacasa told TV Line, he wasn’t even sure he could make that connection.
“I assumed we couldn’t refer to Riverdale because it’s in a completely different universe, but it stayed put,” he said. “So yeah, I guess it exists in the same universe.”
He went on to detail some inside jokes within the cast, with Alex Aiono apparently very into the idea of a football rivalry between the two high schools on both shows.
“I would love it if there was a football game between them,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “But who knows. If we took it further, I don’t even know how far we might take the shared universes. It would be great, but that’s for sure.”
The original Pretty Little Liars was based on a series of books by Sara Shepard and ran on Freeform (then known as ABC Family) for seven seasons. It followed four estranged friends after a mysterious stalker started sending them threatening messages about their deep dark secrets. The show eventually strayed far from the original book series, creating an incredibly tangled web of intrigue. You could say Pretty Little Liars left so Riverdale could launch himself out of a cannon.
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin premiered on HBO Max this summer. It’s the third Pretty Little Liar spinoff, although the other two didn’t last long. Original Sin (which, confusingly, isn’t the original series) follows a different set of characters in a different city—until this episode, when they visited Rosewood and met up with a character from the original series (though played by a different actor). ).
Riverdale has already crossed paths with The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, although that connection is a bit easier to explain. After all, Sabrina is an Archie comic book character. If Aguirre-Sacasa decides to press ahead with the connection, there’s a minor hiccup: Lucy Hale, who played artistic Aria Montgomery in Pretty Little Liars, also starred as Katy Keene in the Riverdale spinoff of the same name. And Katy Keene has already had a Riverdale gig.
But that doesn’t deter executive producer Lindsay Calhoon Bring, who told TV Line she would “love a world where all the shows come together and Lucy Hale doubles as Katy Keene and Aria.”
However, the original author of the Pretty Little Liars books has yet to weigh up. Next thing to find out is: Where does Glee fit in?