The teen drama has, over the past decade or so, slowly but surely crawled to its sad, pitiful demise. From the shuttering of MTV’s scripted programming sector after the end of Teen Wolf in 2017 to the short seasons (and lives) of teen and YA offerings on Netflix and other streamers to the final nail in the coffin through both The CW and Freeform stepping away from either the young adult demo or the scripted space altogether, it’s been a long, long road to get here, but the day has finally come: the teen drama is dead.
Few genres across television have been so long-withstanding, and fewer still have had such an impact on the television landscape and overall industry. The teen drama, which includes classics like One Tree Hill, The OC, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer or more recent hits like Pretty Little Liars, the aforementioned Teen Wolf, and recently-ended Riverdale, is known for its signature soap, delightful melodrama, meme-able moments, and classic teenage shenanigans, and has created a language all its own over the course of its time. From the parents always being clueless to the most well-timed (and sometimes hilarious) needledrops, the teen drama has challenged itself to become more and more simultaneously sincere and ridiculous as the years have gone by, all culminating in a Riverdale finale so bonkers and fitting for the “end” to this storytelling medium that it encapsulates every hit (and miss) of the genre.
Of course, there are still teen dramas being made and currently airing, but none of them are truly peers to the classics of the late ‘90s, early aughts, and even the 2010s. In a post-streaming world, so many hallmarks of the genre have bitten the dust.
Take Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars, for example. The series ran for 7 seasons, each having over 20 episodes per season, and airing across seven years; each season was split into A and B halves, unfolding across the fall and spring TV seasons each year. Now, Max is carrying the banner for the Pretty Little Liars franchise, with their spinoff series (once called Original Sin, now called Summer School for Season 2), but these two series could not be more fundamentally different. For starters, the first season of Original Sin aired in the summer of 2022, and the next will air sometime in 2024 (no release date has been specified yet), and even barring the SAG-AFTRA strike putting a hold on the final days of filming for the season, it’s unlikely that the show would’ve returned this year. And even beyond the long hiatus, the short, 10-episode order of Season 1 cripples this series as well; the time spent with these characters barely scratches the surface of one single season of the original PLL. It’s those two very important facts that separate the teen dramas of then from the teen dramas of now, and why the turning point of The CW and Freeform’s downfalls feels like the end to a genre that’s technically still chugging along.
And really, it’s not these series’ fault; it’s not on their showrunners or on the quality of their writing, but on the broken streaming machine that has ripped the tried and true models of television to shreds. In fact, Pretty Little Liars (2022) is very good, one of my favorite teen dramas of the past few years, and even just co-executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s track record from Riverdale alone is enough to prove that both him and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina‘s Lindsay Calhoon Bring know what they’re doing when it comes to telling long-form teen and YA TV that feels both familiar and revolutionary in comparison to the classic teen soaps we know and love. It’s just that they’re not given nearly enough time to let the sharp and interesting characters they’ve created and the world they’ve stepped into grow into something long-lasting and timeless like their predecessors.
The fact of the matter is that young adult viewers today simply will not get to grow up with these characters the way that teens of the past have gotten to do. With each of these shows airing fewer and fewer episodes across fewer and fewer seasons with massive multi-year hiatuses in between, the same bonds and learning experiences cannot be had with these series, especially when they start dropping like flies after only a few outings. Rather than experiencing adolescence alongside these characters, like learning how to navigate relationships from Rory Gilmore or deal with bullying from Emily Fields (to varying degrees of success, obviously), teens spend most of their time with these characters in limbo, just waiting for that next 8-episode entry to release two years down the line. Like with Netflix’s Stranger Things, the viewers who were 16 when the series dropped in 2016 will be 25 when the final season (hopefully) premieres in 2025. The teens who started the show in its first season are now grown up, while Eleven, Mike, and friends have remained in TV stasis, just waiting for the chance to finally grow up, too.
Networks like The CW and Freeform offered havens for young adult viewers, allowing them to see their own teenage problems on the screen and to see the best versions of characters both alike and strikingly different from themselves. Whether they wanted to disappear into the grounded and realistic familial drama of The Fosters or stow away in the heightened and post-apocalyptic world of The 100, uniquely teenage experiences and relationships could be found, en masse and for extended periods of time, across both Freeform and The CW every single week until each decided to pull away from the formulas that used to be foundational to their brand identities.
Aside from stinted seasons and seemingly infinite hiatuses, teen shows’ lifespans have shorted to oftentimes just two or three seasons. For every Heartstopper and Ginny & Georgia (which have both found great success at Netflix and were renewed for multiple seasons at a time), there are dozens of Teenage Bounty Hunters or Lockwood & Co.s that find themselves at the mercy of the streamer’s unforgiving axe. And even with their string of cancellations, Netflix, surprisingly, is where teen drama is thriving the most. For the other streamers, the offerings just get increasingly more dismal.
In 2022, Peacock canceled their two major YA outings, One of Us Is Lying and Vampire Academy, citing that “the timing wasn’t right.” According to NBC Universal exec Susan Rovner, it was simply too soon to appeal to a young audience—but if not now, when? When will there be “support” for these shows, and who’s to say that teens will be ready to flock in droves when that time comes, especially with no existing catalog for them? Vampire Academy was a perfect entry into that world, especially coming from The Vampire Diaries creators and stars who are seasoned in the art of the teen drama. There was truly no better series to hedge that bet on, and they gave up before it could actually blossom.
And on streamers other than Netflix and Peacock, the future looks just as bleak for teen and YA TV. At Hulu, most of the streamer’s attempts at teen dramas have either come to their natural conclusions or been canceled before their time, including the now-ended Love, Victor and the deleted-from-existence Marvel’s Runaways. Max’s Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin/Summer School and The Sex Lives of College Girls are delightful, but even smaller season orders and major cast departures leave them in unsteady positions ahead of their 2024 releases. Prime’s Gen V isn’t for the faint of heart while The Summer I Turned Pretty continues to be popular yet middling in quality, and Starz, AMC+, and MGM+ have all yet to truly enter the teen space. Apple TV+ has a few entries, both of which are coincidentally period dramas with The Buccaneers and Dickinson, and Paramount+ boasts the renewed School Spirits (which is now sitting in the Top 10 on Netflix) and the still-in-limbo Wolf Pack. Even Disney+’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series joined Doogie Kamealoha M.D., Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, and Big Shot in the can this year.
Besides the failed attempts from streamers to bolster their library and attract young adult audiences, another major plague on the genre is something you likely wouldn’t expect from shows meant to cater to teenagers: a TV-MA rating. Netflix’s smash hit Wednesday is thankfully rated TV-14 (despite having some genuinely chilling imagery not fit for younger audiences), but a number of the shows mentioned above live strictly in the TV-MA sphere. Sex Lives of College Girls, Pretty Little Liars (2022), Euphoria, Wolf Pack, Vampire Academy, and Gen V are all rated for mature audiences, due to varying levels of gore, violence, sexually explicit content, or drug use. Unlike the days of broadcast and cable teen offerings, streaming has allowed for these series to run the gamut when it comes to the mature storylines they can include and the explicit scenes they can show, but where does that leave actual teens? Sure, it’s fun for 20-somethings to tune in to the madness and drama of Euphoria every week, but actual high schoolers should probably steer clear from the often gratuitously explicit series.
So, what now?
Well, the answer is unfortunately unclear. Streamers will continue to try to capture a teen and young adult audience (who, increasingly, are more interested in YouTube and episodes of The Simpsons split into 37 different parts on TikTok) by offering them fewer seasons with less episodes that come out so infrequently that, by the time they have come of age, the characters are still stuck in high school, or by just simply making programming that they can’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) watch due to its TV-MA rating. And when they’re not watching TikTok, teens will continue to discover those old classics, the series that worked and ran for so long for a reason, living on in immortality like Gilmore Girls, The Vampire Diaries, and so many more. Meanwhile, writers who cut their teeth on fully-staffed, multi-year teen dramas like The Originals or The Fosters mourn the learning opportunities provided by these soapy broadcast and cable offerings in an industry that has begun to feel more and more exclusive and difficult to break into.
Since television is a circle and executives seem to learn lessons in five-year increments, it’s very likely that one day, in the very near future, Legacies or Cruel Summer or some other CW, Freeform, or MTV teen show will have a cultural revival, and that will spur the revitalizations of these networks and the teen drama. After all, Suits’ multi-billion stream run this summer has successfully revived both scripted programming and the famed Blue Sky era at USA Network, so it’s only a matter of time before those in charge at these networks realize why these series worked in the first place and attempt to recapture the magic.
Until then, you can find me, and so many others, watching reruns from the heydays of Peak Teen TV, and mourning the incredible soapy drama that brought us endgames, eaten hearts, and shocking twists the likes of which we will deeply miss.
Anna Govert is the TV Editor of Paste Magazine. For any and all thoughts about TV, film, and her unshakable love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you can follow her @annagovert.
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