Hulu’s New Comedy Finally Fixes Pretty Little Liars’ Worst Mistake After 16 Years

Published Nov 11, 2026, 3:04 PM EST Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While Hulu’s new Yuletide rom-com reunites the stars of Pretty Little Liars, the movie also manages to fix the original show’s most infamous mistake with this cute reunion. Time can be a cruel mistress, and this particular maxim is never truer than in the case of famous TV shows. Often, storylines that were considered standard viewing only a few years ago can seem shockingly problematic when viewers revisit them. The jaw-dropping homophobia and transphobia of sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother are one notable example of this phenomenon, but there are other genres of TV shows that are just as impacted by time passing. For instance, Netflix’s political drama Designated Survivor, as well as its genre contemporaries like House of Cards, Madam Secretary, Scandal, and even the sillier satire Veep, all feel dated and tame in comparison to real-life political corruption scandals of the last ten years. Similarly, HBO’s The Newsroom was absurdly dated before the show even finished its run, as the preponderance of social media newsfeeds rendered the traditional newsroom almost obsolete. However, none of these instances are quite as cringe-inducing as one infamous plot line from FreeForm’s Pretty Little Liars, a teen mystery thriller based on the novel series of the same name by The Lying Game writer Sara Shepard. The show’s most controversial romance was so shocking that Hulu’s new romcom The 12 Dates of Christmas took it upon itself to essentially retcon the plot. Pretty Little Liars’ Ezra/Aria Romance Is Its Most Controversial Mistake Airing 160 episodes over seven seasons between 2010 and 2017, Pretty Little Liars told the story of four high school girls with a dark secret. After Sasha Pieterse’s Alison DiLaurentis disappears, her former friends, Lucy Hale’s Aria Montgomery, Troian Bellisario’s Spencer Hastings, Shay Mitchell’s Emily Fields, and Ashley Benson’s Hanna Marin, quickly grow apart. However, a mysterious unseen villain calling themselves ‘A’ soon brings the group back together with a string of threatening texts. Thus, the stage is set for a show that takes the small town mystery of Twin Peaks and mixes it with the high-stakes high school drama of shows like The O.C., Riverdale, or Gossip Girl. Pretty Little Liars was a cult classic throughout its run, but the show’s retrospective reviews all point out the same absurdly problematic plot line. Aria is a 16-year-old high school student when she starts dating her English teacher Ezra, who is 22 years old. Real-life actors Lucy Hale and Ian Harding were 21 and 24, respectively, while shooting season 1, making their scenes together entirely reasonable and professionally appropriate. However, this arguably only made the romance between the high school student and her teacher more problematic on screen, since the couple were treated as the show’s main epic romance and Pretty Little Liars even ended with their wedding. HBO Already Mocked Pretty Little Liars’ Famous Mistake Everett To be fair, the teacher/ student romance was a pretty commonplace trope in teen TV shows of the 2000s and 2010s, cropping up in Gilmore Girls, Riverdale, and Gossip Girl's original run. However, what Pretty Little Liars got wrong was making this romance into a major plot line that lasted from the pilot to the finale. What made matters worse was the fact that the same storyline ends with Ezra's early arrest in the source novels. Season 2 of HBO’s R-rated Pretty Little Liars reboot, Summer School, even featured a scene where the heroine mentioned that she met Ezra and Aria offscreen and wrote the couple off as “Creepy.” However, The 12 Dates of Christmas goes a step further. The festive Hulu romcom recasts Hale and Harding as the hard-working career woman Christina Walker and her unexpectedly perfect love interest, Peter Grant. This time, Harding’s The 12 Dates of Christmas hero is charismatic, age-appropriate, and mercifully, not a high school teacher grooming her, unlike Aria’s infamous Pretty Little Liars love interest. Release Date 2010 - 2017-00-00 Network ABC, Freeform Showrunner Ina Marlene King Writers Ina Marlene King Franchise(s) Pretty Little Liars