Caleb Rivers in "Pretty Little Liars"

The Recurring Bad-Boy, Homeless Love Interest of Hanna

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In the ABC-Family teen mystery drama "Pretty Little Liars," the character of Caleb Rivers, played by Tyler Blackburn, was a sporadic recurring character in season one and season two, then was promoted to a main character appearing nearly weekly in the third season and remaining a major part of the storyline through all seven seasons. He also was the lead character in the short-lived spin-off Ravenswood.

Caleb begins as a friend of Hanna (one of the namesake "pretty little liars") then becomes her boyfriend, but unlike a great many characters on the program, Caleb Rivers will never be a murder suspect even though he is a master of other questionable skills.

Abandoned by both his biological and foster parents, we soon discover that Caleb has been living in the school, but Hanna invites him to live in her basement. As the series progresses, their relationship ebbs and flows from dating to friends to bitter rivals and back again, making Caleb one of the central focal points of the overarching plot of "Pretty Little Liars."

First Appearances in Season One

In the 14th episode of Season One, Caleb is the new bad boy at school; he can hack cell phones, but he charges for the service. This talent will be key to the story's plot as Hanna requests that he hack her phone so that she can call Maya St. Germain at her reform school, but more phone trickery recurs throughout the season.

In the next episode, titled "If at First You Don't Succeed, Lie, Lie Again," Hanna winds up in detention with Caleb, who discovers she wants to stop Ella from driving to Philadelphia before he bails himself out by staging a call from his social worker on his own hacked phone. The next day, Caleb hands Hanna a piece of Ella's car and refuses to accept money from her and instead asks for a favor that will be determined later.

In Episode 16, "Je Suis une Amie," Caleb returns to Hanna and asks her to date him to raise his credibility at school in exchange for the car part he delivered in the last episode; eventually, Aria and Hanna discover that he's living in the school building, and Hanna invites him to hide in her basement.

They begin to form a relationship that proves to be complicated—they fall in and out of love repeatedly over the course of the seasons. Later in season one, Hanna and Caleb start secretly dating before Hanna's mother discovers Caleb living in the basement and kicks him out of the house. Hanna leaves with him and they camp in the woods where Hanna loses her virginity to Caleb.

Caleb decides to go to Arizona to look for his mother, but before he leaves he writes a letter to Hanna. When he takes the letter to Hanna's house to give it to her, he finds only Mona. Mona tells him that Hanna does not want to talk to him, and Caleb leaves the letter with Mona—who promptly destroys the letter and never tells Hanna about it, befitting her role as a little liar.

Caleb does see Hanna again before he boards the bus headed out of town, but when she shows no reaction to him, he leaves.

Caleb's Return and Further Plots

At the end of Season One, Hanna's friend Lucas goes to Arizona to bring Caleb back in hopes of making her happy, and in the first episode of Season Two, the two drive back into the town of Rosewood together. Caleb moves in with Lucas and begins a quest to apologize and make amends with Hanna.

After a few episodes, the two eventually begin dating again after a series of dramatic incidents (mostly involving Hanna and the rest of the "little liars"). However, throughout the course of the second season, a mysterious man in a black sedan begins watching Caleb, and it's soon revealed that he's a private detective hired by Caleb's birth mother, who turns out to be rich.

After he goes off to California to meet his mother, Caleb returns to Rosewood and gets more involved with hacking into phones and computers to try to reveal the identity of the mysterious "A," but his laptop is eventually confiscated by the police. After Mona unsuccessfully attempts to break up Hanna and Caleb, the couple shares a dance dressed as Romeo and Juliet to end the second season.

In this way, Caleb becomes a key part of Pretty Little Liars storyline. Further seasons see Caleb in and out love with Hanna many times; dealing with a gunshot wound and run-ins with police; meeting and rejecting his birth father; anchoring the supernatural-themed spin-off Ravenswood; and dealing with too many other dramatic events. Through it all, though, he remains an expert at hacking cell phones and other bad-boy skills. 

Catch up with Pretty Little Liars' creator Marlene King