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| PRETTY LITTLE LIARS showrunner Marlene King |
Kevin Mulcahy Jr.: How have you been so successful leveraging social media to support PLL? How much of that do you attribute to your online presence, which is very strong; and how much to the structure or the content or in other words, just the nature of the show that you created?
Marlene King: I think it’s probably equal to both. I think the fact that the PRETTY LITTLE LIARS started tweeting and social mediaing about the show when we were even at pilot phase sort of started this real grass roots, I would say, almost family, this social media family where from pilot stage our fans felt like they were a part of this PRETTY LITTLE LIARS family.
Kevin Mulcahy Jr.: What would you say would be your advice to other show writers who want to get more out of the Internet?
Marlene King: Just to utilize it and have fun with it. We don’t tweet or Facebook unless we’re having a good time with it so it’s really organic to our process. I would say have fun with it and tweet and Facebook and don’t be afraid to reach out to your fans.
Kevin Mulcahy Jr.: In interviewing the actors of the show I’ve noticed that they like to mention that there’s this incredible attention to detail in the script and possible future plot elements. You don’t know that they’re significant at the time. What’s your process like for planning something like that out, and when you started out (you created the show) how far in the future did you have that mapped out?
Marlene King: I certainly didn’t have the future mapped out for B but we did know what the end game of the series was going to be. What the ultimate reveal will be in the final episode so it’s been really fun just being on this path and this journey to get to that place.
I will give a big shout out to our props department. Chris, who is our prop master does such an amazing job with detail in the show. There are so many props in the show that end up being everything from an ink pen that says, “Doherty’s Landing” and that’s how the girls find out Ali’s clue. Like those things I try to keep as many of those props as I can. My office started to look like a PRETTY LITTLE LIARS museum, but there is so much detail in the show and we have so much fun. The table reads, too like even lines of dialog whenever there’s something—there might be something that, for example there’s something Spencer says in the pilot, and then she says again in the Season 3B finale, and they raise their hand and they scream, “Call back!” They know. They remember all those details too.
Kevin Mulcahy Jr.: Since PRETTY LITTLE LIARS is kind of a juggernaut could you describe any sort of series or projects that you have in the works now for the future?
Marlene King: I’ve been developing a show with ABC Family based on a movie that I wrote called Now and Then, and so we’re really excited down the line to get in to that too.
