The Teen Drama Is Dead

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.