English Entertainment
Go Back to Black & White with the Pretty Little Liars!
MUMBAI: Next Saturday, be there for the black and white affair. It’s the Pretty Little Liars (PLL) like you’ve never seen.
For the first time in its 4 season run, the groundbreaking teen phenomenon has filmed an entire episode completely in black and white called “Shadow Play”, with heavy throwback at the classic Hollywood noir films of the yesteryear.
PLL writer and spin-off Ravenswood co-creator Joseph Dougherty is helming the episode which revolves around the character of the smart, yet headstrong and stubborn Spencer Hastings (played by Troian Bellasario), who has been going through many a sleepless night fueled by Aderol and she’s trying desperately to find out whether or not Ezra Fitz is A, the sinister antagonist hell-bent on exposing their lies and lives. Just to push her further, Spencer takes another pill as a result of which she loses touch completely with her own reality and wakes up in a new reality which has her life “Noir-ified”.
Making it “one of the photographed episodes of the series”, writer-director Joseph Doherty elaborates, “The central portion of the storytelling will be told in a particular kind of black and white which is meant to honor a form of very lush story-telling from American films of the forties.”
“With this episode, you could literally stop it at any point and print it out blow it up on a poster and it will look stunning”, says Shay Mitchell, who plays the role of the lesbian swimmer Emily Fields in a behind the scenes video on YouTube. Lucy Hale, who plays the artsy girl Aria Montgomery is still amazed at how all the liars faces “work for the era” making the episode incredibly authentic. Bellasario welcomed the prospect of the episode as a surprising world where people were bold, brash and adventurous, taking chances and risks, quite similar to that of the actual story.
 |
Shadow Play continues the storyline with where the characters are and how the story is progressing, but the dialogue is “dated”!
While Mitchell is of the opinion that Shadow Play is one that goes down in history, PLL costume designer Mandi Line states that designing the costumes for an episode based in the period of the 1940’s and one that is shot completely in black and white comes with a unique set of challenges. What Line originally had been planned for the episode didn’t work out at all, because when it comes in black and white, “Color Doesn’t Matter.”
Line’s challenge was convincing the Pretty Little Liars that along with peach and green and leopard and all these different colors, and how in black and white they actually pop. So the actors are wearing green shoes with purple dress with leopard green trench coat, which in color would make them look crazy because they might not match, but it makes complete sense in black and white.
 |
Line concludes that the best of working on this episode was that the script taught her something, and it had been a while she’d been taught something. Working on Shadow Play has certainly heightened her skills as a costume designer.
Follow the Liars as they enact a “Shadow Play” with more classic drama, passion, secrets and of course, lies on Saturday, 22 February at 2 p.m. with an encore telecast at 10 p.m. on Zee Café.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
