ABC Family is turning out to be a force to be reckoned with
this summer. With hits like The Fosters and Switched at
Birth, and the juggernaut that is Pretty Little Liars, it's
no surprise that the suspense drama, Twisted is hitting the
mark, and then some. The premise is not entirely unique for
the network, starting the season with a murder in the pilot,
but what IS unique are the characters and the unfolding
relationships that seem much more riveting than the
who-killed-Regina plotline. Set in the fictional small town,
Green Grove, the series picks up five years after the then
eleven-year-old Danny Desai brutally killed his aunt while
she was babysitting him and his two friends,Lacey and Jo,
who were playing in the yard. Danny, played by the very
handsome Avan Jogia, returns after a stint in juvie to an
extremely cold reaction from his friends, and the whole
school, who nickname his Socio. While Danny was away, Jo,
played by Maddie Hasson and Lacey, played by Kylie Bunbury,
drift apart, and Lacey emerges as the requisite popular girl
every teen drama needs while Jo has gone the way of
misunderstood loner. All this culminates in a party in which
the mean girl Regina develops a bad-boy crush on Danny and
proceeds to throw herself at him. An embarrassing scene
ensues, and Danny winds up receiving an even more mortifying
text from Regina, asking him to come over. Regina turns up
dead and the town suspects Danny, and the audience is meant
to as well as we see him handling her missing necklace at
the end of the episode. While it seems like standard fare,
Twisted has a few unique attributes, the Y chromosome not
being the only one.
Episode two picks up at Regina’s funeral, and the entire arc
of the episode is building toward a season-long who-done-it.
Twisted is shaping up a lot like the other ABC Family shows
except for Danny. Avan Jogia has us eating out of Danny’s
hand as the tortured charmer who we suspect, but love
anyway. He is the star of the show, and all the other
characters are just coasting in his orbit. Danny is cute and
clever and dark and menacing, and I can hear America
swooning every time the opening credits start. It is his
participation in the weird love-friendship-triangle that
exists between him, Jo and Lacey that is much more
intriguing than the murder, providing much more drama and
suspense, to boot.
On a network with “a bit of a murder problem,” Twisted is
holding its own and may have enough PG-13 edge to sustain
the timeslot following PLL. It is summer, after all. What
would summer be without a stack of beautiful dead teenagers?
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