One of Our Greatest Types of TV Shows Is Now an Endangered Species

With little fanfare outside of the not-so-surprise return of an old fan favorite, the Freeform drama Good Trouble completed its laudable five-season run on March 5. Its network sibling Grown-ish, the college-focused spinoff of ABC’s Black-ish, will soon, after a prolonged and disjointed sixth season, air its series finale, unceremoniously ushering in a disappointing era of TV that you might call “post-teen.” It’s certainly not the sole fault of the Disney-owned basic cable channel, which, back in its early-aughts ABC Family days, was the home of sleeper hits like The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Switched at Birth. After all, it was less than two years ago that the CW, another former beacon of scripted young adulthood, became gobbled up by Nexstar Media Group, causing a fire sale of cancellations and reconfigurations that make it today unrecognizable to those who once fanatically sought to unmask Gossip Girl or were early adopters of vampire boy–teen girl relations. Recently, I’ve felt that the TV landscape, in all its modern sensibilities, seems to be closing the book on a particular image of what it means to be young—no longer a child, but not quite an adult. Teen TV was once as triumphant as it was confounding; to see it become an endangered species is as alarming as it is depressing.

In many ways, network TV purged its teens some time ago, and perhaps cable is simply following suit. It’s easy to suggest that newer generations of adolescents and burgeoning almost-adults have abdicated their once dominant place in prime-time timeslots simply because handheld digital platforms offer a contemporary equivalent, sped up, abundant, and algorithmically curated to their ever-changing and delightfully peculiar tastes. That’s fair. TikTok, Twitch, and Discord servers where everyone pretends they’re fae exist. Young folk don’t watch television—the heavy one with the wires and the fixed schedule and numbered channels to surf—anymore. “Prime time” itself is an antiquated concept, or maybe more of a state of mind, or maybe a future “Today I learned” fun fact for some University of Colorado freshmen. But regardless of which forces killed the TV of old, I’m not here to Veronica Mars the true culprit. This is simply another sad love song.

Teens once dominated television, seemingly in the wake of a collective realization, decades ago, that exuberant, emotional, and “edgy” adolescent characters—as well as the demographics they both represented and courted—were plainly the most interesting parts of family dramas, situational comedies, school stories, and, perhaps, American culture by and large. Take, for instance, NBC’s The Facts of Life: Once the Diff’rent Strokes spinoff, which premiered in 1979, came to terms with the reality that the matronly housemother, headmaster, and teachers of an all-girls boarding school in upstate New York were pretty superfluous to the show’s youthful core, the series flourished in ways that outpaced its whatchu talkin’ ’bout roots and most network offerings of the time.

The version of teen TV that emerged in the prime-time slots of the 1980s evolved, often organically, from the family-oriented series of the 1970s—like the tremendously popular Little House on the Prairie or the nostalgia-bait of a hit, Happy Days—that had already deployed their younger characters to great effect. While there were surely misguided Joanie Loves Chachi–styled efforts to focus more squarely on familiar young-adult faces, the commitment to presenting dramas, comedies, and soap operas from a teenage perspective became more evident as the ’80s gave way to the ’90s, and Degrassi Junior High graduated into an international sensation in syndication. Teen TV, to put it plainly, became a force—a serialized outlet of upbeat melodrama, comedy, and cultural ephemera inviting all eyes, but made pointedly for a chosen, markedly young, few.

In 1987, with this logic in its infancy, NBC aired the pilot episode of Good Morning, Miss Bliss, a workplace comedy starring Hayley Mills as the titular Miss. By most accounts, Mills was having a bit of a resurgence in the mid-to-late ’80s; not quite in her original Parent Trap heyday, but a trio of made-for-TV sequels, in which she reprised her role as the now all-grown-up twins who charmingly undid their parents’ divorce, garnered some success (think: the buzz around Lindsay Lohan’s Netflix flicks now). Placing her at the front of a Midwestern middle school classroom full of future heartthrobs (Jonathan Brandis), Peach Pit regulars (Brian Austin Green), and suspendered cultural icons (Jaleel White) was, on the surface, a bit of a no-brainer. Don’t worry if you can’t remember this show: After the pilot, the series took more than a year to be thoroughly retooled for the relatively young and young-focused Disney Channel, recasting all of the students and even the principal, shifting away from the pesky grown-up stuff like Miss Bliss’ new marriage, and softening the bummer plot points of preteen grief. Finally, by the fall of 1988, the Mouse had realized the show’s full potential as an auspicious vehicle for blond proto-fuckboy Zack Morris. And thus Saved by the Bell was born.

Upon its return to TV in 1989, new identity in place, the series was primed to become a contortionist of a TV franchise that would twist and bend to whatever trends of the day to establish a teen powerhouse on Saturday mornings. Zack Morris (still played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar) was now in Southern California with no recollection of middle school in Indiana. In fact, all of teendom was now basking in the SoCal sun. NBC had just recently sent The Facts of Life gang to Malibu. Sweet Valley High, California Dreams, Clueless, Melrose Place, The O.C., Doogie Howser, M.D., and many others would reiterate this point throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Admittedly, sometimes teens could be found acting freak-ish or geek-ish in nondescript suburbs, sipping strawberry shakes in anachronistic small-town diners, fast-talking themselves into love triangles on a creek, gossiping in the halls of ritzy New York City private schools, or learning life lessons at schools tangential to Toronto’s real-life Degrassi Street. Even so, for better or worse, often the thinking behind these increasingly eclectic instances of teen life featured unmistakable Bayside High DNA.

A similar transformation took place when a modest-box-office 1992 comedy featuring a Valley Girl turned vampire hunter was adapted to the small screen in ’97. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s novel approach to speculative storytelling and its focus on feminine empowerment, all while presenting a fun and thoughtful image of being a teen in demon-infested Southern California, resonated with its young audience in ways that changed what was seen as possible on TV. Outsiderness, insecurity, self-doubt, queerness, angst, deadbeat then suddenly dead parents, and a persistent sort of grassroots challenge to overwhelming forces represent Buffy’s thematic commitment to representing adolescence authentically while belying Hollywood’s commitment to the vaunted “18-to-34, educated, white, affluent” demographic. That is, by most metrics, the advent of teen TV would be more accurately predicated on the understanding that the downward trend of overall TV viewership from its 1970s heights could be managed only if the remaining viewers were catered to and impressionable enough to make economic sense. Television—and so many other forms of mainstream media—relied on young people like a shadowy coalition of oldsters that, for reasons unclear, constantly needed thin, conventionally attractive teenage girls to slay the monsters and kiss the vampire boys, who were conveniently also attractive and kept young forever. The arrangement just worked. Until it didn’t.

Teens didn’t always exist. They were conjured, coaxed, elided, and gaslit into existence. They came to be a shared fever dream, with great emphasis on the shared part. Adolescence, as psychologist G. Stanley Hall proclaimed in 1904—bringing serious scientific and cultural considerations of the unique segment of a life between 13 and 24 years old to the forefront—is a time of Sturm und Drang. Storm and stress. It’s obviously not the case that things are calmer and less stressful today than, say, when leading U.S. presidential candidates weren’t also sexually assaultive insurrectionists. But, once upon a time, many could at least pretend, in 30- or 60-minute episodic blocks—some episodes were even “very special”—that the storm was recognizable, trope-laden, laugh track–friendly, but manageable. The stress was even generative. Was anxiety even a concept for Cory Matthews, Topanga, and Shawn? Did Sabrina Spellman get to separate magic from menstruation? Were Tia and Tamera ever sent to therapy for what’s so easily overlooked in a messy, transracial dual adoption in Detroit?

Ultimately what we lose as teen television passes on is not the inherent difficulty of teenage realities coping with relationships, identity, bodies, and an unfortunately bleak outlook for the environmental and geopolitical future. What we lose is the liminal space that made reality itself most malleable. Teenage audiences may have existed in the nickelodeon theaters of the early 20^th century, where, for five cents, you could catch a scenic or vaudeville moving picture in cities throughout the country long before the youth-oriented cable network borrowed the moniker. But what television offered teendom was a sort of cultural synchronicity where the images of a youthful rebellion and romance were perhaps erroneously descriptive, but enchantingly prescriptive of a collective reality that viewers were in the midst of together.

When that strange, liminal, and potentially off-putting reality was front and center—like when 24-year-old Luke Perry, playing a high schooler in 1990, courted real-life teenager Shannen Doherty’s Brenda Walsh, who had newly arrived to the fancy-pants 90210 zip code—being caught between immature characterizations and mature themes, morality plays and regularly scheduled scandal, virtue signaling and bad-faith gestures, was precisely what it meant to be young but not too young. Maturing but most certainly not yet old. And this phenomenon was adamantly mainstream, all occurring in the light of day or, more accurately, in the warm glow of TV sets.

But today, to borrow from journalist and podcaster Derek Thompson’s comments in a recent Ringer interview, maybe everything has become a cult. “A cult,” Thompson suggests, “is an intense and relatively novel movement that defines itself in opposition to a mainstream.” Teendom housed, as everything else has become, in niche microspaces and deep in the cellars of streaming platforms, in disparate corners of the internet and in increasingly bleak circumstance, poses a cult-like risk arguably not because of a cult’s inherent dangers, but because, more and more, young peoples are being corralled into completely different, polarized, increasingly fringe cults. No longer being able to exist in the in-between that adolescence, as a concept, affords has material repercussions beyond just the fragmentation of a mainstream youth identity. The end of teen TV suggests that the mainstream and young people (even rich, white ones) may be irreparably at odds in ways not previously seen (for the rich, white ones).

What we’re left with today is pointedly unlike Saved by the Bell’s occasionally ham-fisted after-school-special energy, or the actual ABC Afterschool Special series that aired from 1972 to 1997 and presumed not only that adolescent audiences needed guidance, but that the guidance itself could be both moralistic and constructive of what it means to be a teen in America. Teens today know acutely how to be teens, for better or worse. For every charmingly sardonic Wednesday or bubbly depiction of multiversal traveling besties à la Davey & Jonesie’s Locker, there are both tongue-in-cheek and earnest reminders that, to quote the title of the short-lived Netflix series, “Everything Sucks!,” or there are more than 13 reasons why young folk in particular are facing a severe mental health crisis.

The most-tweeted TV show of the decade, Euphoria, set in another fictional California town, imagines American teens in rich, saturated hues against a poppy, hypnotizing soundtrack, but in some rather dreary situations. There’s been much ado about explicit content, including self-harm, drug abuse, and graphic depictions of sex, but savvy fans of the teen-TV genre can easily recognize a post-Bayside Jesse Spano trajectory tinged with late-night HBO (or Skinemax) sensibilities. Yet Zendaya’s tour de force performance as Rue diverges from the teen-TV tradition largely due to the fact that HBO’s Euphoria is “a cult teen drama” in every sense. There’s a visible fragmentation of the experience of the show like a kaleidoscope of cynicism—from creator Sam Levinson’s contention that it’s a “deeply, deeply personal story” to the show’s hypermemeability, to the reality that obsessives of the series may not actually be watching it. Even card-carrying Euphoria cult members may find themselves without any overlap, because having more distinct cults makes commercial sense today in a way they never have before.

The narratives and metanarratives of adolescence in today’s media, from the fearmongering to the apathetic to the sensational, seem increasingly antagonistic to young people as a key societal force in their own right, while not once letting up on the exploitation of them as a demographic. Arguably, it’s become even more nefarious as screens became smaller and more ubiquitous, despite all the warnings. TV of yesteryear may have paved the way, but teendom is now squarely at odds with a culture that continues to take so much from it. For an IRL analog, imagine canceling university commencement ceremonies for a class of students that notably didn’t get to graduate from high school in person four years ago, all while ignoring the undue burden of student loan debt and the rising costs of education. The complex liminality we once revered in prime time has given way to a sense that young people may be caught between a rock and a hard place and culturally, we’re uninterested.

So, as we lay to rest the type of television that unabashedly staked a claim to that space between childhood and adulthood, we’re left with a lot to resolve in increasingly isolating and vulnerable, inclusive yet challenging, boldly imaginative but bewildering ways. There is still worthwhile content focused on teens out there. We’re definitely better off knowing how toxic, sexist, and racist some of our juvenile media faves may have been, and continuing to progress toward healthier representations of adolescence and shared ideals. Good Trouble borrowed undoubtedly from Party of Five and Melrose Place, but with decidedly more queer characters and characters of color. Grown-ish, at its core, modernizes A Different World’s Black college experience as best it can, being that the bar was notably high to begin with. But what if the conclusions of these series suggest that television may never see anything like them again? What if we’ve stopped sharing, in the schoolyard sense?

Maybe it’s here that my eulogy requires a fourth-wall-breaking “Time out!” and recognition that young people have a relationship with media today that was unimaginable once. That revolution was definitely televised. The next one likely won’t be.