‘Pretty Little Liars’ summer finale, big ‘A’ reveal draw huge ratings for ABC Family

If only “Pretty Little Liars” could make a major revelation like the one they made last night every week, then you could go ahead and lock the show in for an eighth season.

The ratings have now come in from Tuesday night’s episode “Game Over, Charles,” and they were about as enormous as you would have expected and then some. The new episode drew in total a very-impressive 1.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic along with over 3.1 million viewers. In case you are wondering, these are the show’s best ratings in almost two years, as the season 4 Halloween Special drew very similar ratings. Just for the sake of comparison, this was more than three-tenths higher in the demo than any other episode this season, and had around 700,000 more total viewers. That’s very impressive, and shows that while not everyone is watching live, there is still a great curiosity around the reveal of “A” / Charles. (As you know, it turned out to be Charlotte a.k.a. CeCe Drake.)

Now, the question is how many of these people will still be watching the midseason premiere in January. Signs point to a major drop. We’re not saying this as a slam on the show or anything, but it is going to be incredibly hard for them to match this sort of success. Much of the reason for the summer finale’s explosion was the big reveal, and now that this is over, many may feel satisfied.

Also, it doesn’t help that many were reportedly unhappy with the ending. While there were sole plot holes here and there (Toby’s mother), it did a pretty remarkable job making the majority of the story into something that made sense. Granted, we feel like a great percentage of people who “threatened to not watch” anymore actually will.

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