What would summer TV be without a new, trashy ABC Family show featuring attractive girls of questionable innocence? I direct your attention to Pretty Little Liars, which premiered this week on ABC Family.

Despite its seeming similarity, though, this particular series marks a strong departure from previous programming on the network. ABC Family has now jumped on the CW bandwagon of building its shows on successful teen novel franchises. CW began with Gossip Girl and then expanded into teen fantasy fiction with The Vampire Diaries, and both of those shows have proven successful enough to warrant continued production of television shows based on popular book series. The eighth book in Sara Shepards’ Pretty Little Liars series came out last week in co-ordination with the release of the show’s first episode, and I think it’s hard to deny the appeal of developing programming around a collection of long-form narratives with an already proven audience.

Let's not even talk about the fact that this lovely young woman is supposed to be IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Pretty Little Liars actually looks much more like a CW show than a show for ABC Family – at least in the first episode, it has none of the earnestness or morals-focused messages of The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Even though the subject matter varies, most of the ABC Family line-up has a characteristic sweetness, which can range from saccharine saturated conservative throwback family values shows with creakingly ancient premises (Secret Life, any ABC Family sitcom), or endearingly cheerful, occasionally wry but largely good-natured programming (Greek, my beloved and cancelled The Middleman). Pretty Little Liars is a departure from that spectrum of sweetness, and the results are both good and bad. The premise is that four girls in a clique share many secrets, one of the most important being the disappearance of their friend Allison, whose body is discovered in the pilot episode a year after first going missing. Turns out, Allison has been endowed with the ability to send creepy, blackmail-themed text messages from beyond the grave (or some particularly cruel imposter has taken on that unpleasant task), and the girls of Pretty Little Liars end the pilot episode after discovering they’ve all been recipients of these messages. Not only that, but there seems to also be a mysterious cover-up about a girl named Jenna, and now there’s a cop investigating Allison’s death. Stay tuned next week – DUN DUN DUN.

Text message from beyond the grave!

But ABC Family’s familiar reminders about the dangers of premarital sex and the puppy dog longing for a soul mate are nowhere to be found, and instead the whole thing comes off as Desperate Housewives Junior. I don’t miss the preachy language or the plot lines that go CLUNK in the night, especially when so much of the moral righteousness was undermined by salacious visuals or shenanigans like political guest appearances. (Bristol Palin was a guest on a very special episode of Secret Life last season. No, I am not joking.) I do miss ABC Family’s oddly antiquarian tone, though. For so much of the programming, the network has been a place where the sappy family bonding moment is not immediately revealed to be devious or ridiculous. No longer. Pretty Little Liars is built on the CW mode of sly undercutting and teenage betrayals, and its tart sharpness does slice through all of that sweetness quite effectively. Case in point – Hanna, one of the four female leads, has a shoplifting habit and is caught by the police. Rather than receiving a sharp reprimand from her mother and shamefully returning the stolen item, Hanna’s mother tells her that it matters what other people think, and then gets the charges dropped by sleeping with the arresting officer. It’s illegal, sexy, wrong on so many levels.

Hanna, comtemplating theft, and her mother, contemplating Hanna's arresting officer

Poor ABC Family. It feels a little like watching a particularly attractive, evil popular girl take down the less glamorous class sweetheart with one crushing comment.