The Fall of the 'Teen' Show..

Hey hey, it's Sean posting super late.

Okay, so that title hints at some brilliant genre study leading to a well-found thesis on the fall of teen shows. I'm not going to cover the rise of the teen show (defined later) as I don't know enough about it. All I know is that My So Called Life is the apex of this genre and everything after has been garbage in comparison.
I've been watching eps of MSCL lately on a DVD box-set and it's incredible. It's funny, Angela (Danes) is whiny in a pre-emo sort of way (premo?), her friends are a drunk girl and a gay dude (bi according to ep 1) , the neighbor dude is this nerd that gets used a lot, and there's even Jared Leto as the obligatory aloof hot dude! Enough gushing, back to the academics of this..

When I say teen shows, I'm talking about prime time, hour-long shows that focus on high-school/college aged kids doing the standard teen stuff. There are the teen show staples: shows on booze, drugs, sex, AIDS (if it's the 90's), rebellion, and the other stresses of American teenage life. Examples: 90210, The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Gossip Girl, etc.

So why is MSCL so damn good? It covers the same trite topics as the other shows mentioned, but what makes it different? The answer is simple: an attempt at realism, or, more simply, trying to attract a teen audience without a bunch of extra crap.
I think about it this way. Who is the target audience for these shows? Young people, 14-25, most likely suburban. MSCL went for this audience by making an attempt at representing this audience in its characters rather some lame fantasy reality.

The other mentioned shows all rely on some gimmick for viewership. How many viewers are super rich like the "teens" on 90210 or The O.C. or Gossip Girl? A tiny fraction of the audience. And how many have super powers like Clark on Smallville or a quirky relationship with their mother (Gilmore Girls)? Once again, not that many (I knew like two people with super powers in high school, TWO. ONLY TWO. Come on!).
Why do these programs have to take teen scenarios and layer on extra glitz and subplot to get viewers? Isn't the teen experience itself dramatic enough? Apparently not, I guess MSCL got bad ratings and was canceled after a season. But it's sooo good!

One of the things I hate about teen shows now is that they feel like packaged marketing with a story attached. Is Gossip Girl really about whether Blair and Chuck will hook-up or the thing with with Jenny's parents? No, not at all, it's about the hip mobile phones the girls chat on, the new fashions they wear, and the "music featured on" pitch at the end of the show. The entire program is just a vessel for some corporate agenda, man, it's like bogus. On MSCL, Angela doesn't once wear something you'd call fashionable. She literally wears a different form of unflattering plaid in every episode. RaeAnn, her drunk slut friend, wears like gypsy rags and beads. And Ricky? (Bi dude). He wears the ugliest crap of all! A sunflower shirt with cover-alls? There's no way the show was pushing those clothes.
Same goes for the music. Sure, there was this one part where Angela does a laundry list of bands she likes (lots of grunge-era stuff, Smashing Pumpkins is one name I recall, Cranberries, too). But if the music is in the show, it's almost always diegetic. The show feels like a show, not a one hour commercial for imaginary teen lifestyle.

The parents are also pretty realistic. I must admit, though, the mom and dad spend way too much time in pajamas talking about their kids before bed. Still, at least they're not idealist lawyers or former rockers. They run a print-shop.

Okay, I wanted to make some huge point about the decline of the teen demographic and how over-commercialization of our young is destroying the production of quality hour programming, but I feel like I'd rather just rant about how awesome MSCL is. This post is long enough already. Well, you should just watch it. At the very least, you'll laugh at all the topical mid 90's references.

By the way, while writing this post I was listening to the new album by Hot Chip. Cheers.

This entry was posted by Sean, on Wednesday, February 06, 2008. You can leave your response.