My So-Called Teen Dramas 

I came into adolescence in the age of the supernatural teen drama. Spanning across novels, television, and film from the mid-aughts through the 2010s, the likes of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, The CW's The Vampire Diaries, and Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments proved inescapable. The repeated promise of the genre was seductive: you, a normal (probably brunette, probably clumsy, vaguely-described so as to be maximally available for reader self-insertion) girl, were just too desirable to the sexy male [insert vampire/werewolf/fallen angel/etc. here].  

Or, if the fantasy drama didn't appeal to you, you could turn to the baroque plot mechanics of such shows as Gossip Girl (The CW again!) or Pretty Little Liars (then ABC Family, now Freeform), which were blessedly free from [vampires/werewolves/fallen angels] but felt like fantasy nonetheless. Despite being populated by ostensible teenagers (often played by 18-30 year olds), these shows might as well have featured werewolves and witches, given how far removed they were from the workings of everyday teen life.  

In response to all this fantasy, glitz, and gloss, teenaged me found refuge in my idealized mental image of 90s culture, especially grunge, which in my mind was so authentic by comparison. My Pandora featured such stations as "The Cranberries Radio," "Garbage Radio," "Portishead Radio," etc. I sometimes fell asleep watching Nirvana's Unplugged on my tiny iPod Touch screen. I wanted desperately to dress like Courtney Love, though I didn't have the nerve, and ended up dressing more like a PTA mom (infinity scarves and cardigans and colored skinny jeans).  

So you can imagine how I felt when I first saw a Tumblr gifset of Jordan Catalano, with his choker and flannels and floppy 90s hair. I knew I had to watch whatever show he was from immediately. And so I found My So-Called Life.  

My So-Called Life has many virtues, but one of its best is its genuine interest in the mundane qualities of teenage life. Its distinctly 90s flavor brought me in — like its central protagonist Angela Chase, I was prone to lying on my bed and listening to The Cranberries, and also to bopping around my room to "Blister in the Sun" — but what kept me compelled was how much its central teen characters felt like me and like people I knew. In much of the other teen-centric media I'd encountered, the characters were figured as aspirational, even if the tropes were relatable: they were gorgeous, or wealthy, or powerful, or "chosen ones" trapped in stories of epic destinies and romances. My own public high school in Colorado was not populated by the likes of Serena Van Der Woodsen, Katniss Everdeen, or Buffy Summers. But I knew a Brian, a Rayanne, a Rickie, a Sharon. I may not have known a Jordan Catalano, but the fictional one did just fine. (I was also too young to fully realize that Jordan is as Bruce Weber's contemporaneous review of the series in The New York Times deemed him: just a "handsome, dunderheaded galoot."1 Never mind all that. Though I was too young in age to be a part of what Doree Shafrir has termed "Generation Catalano,"2 I was fully on board in spirit.)  

MSCL's characters are archetypal, but lived-in; they embody the kinds of generic conventions that arise out of the familiar textures of real life. While MSCL occasionally strays into the cheesy and contrived, it often manages to honor the maneuvers of adolescence with grace. It knows both that the overblown feelings of Angela et al. are real to them — more real than anything else — but also that they will pass. As Ginia Bellafante wrote for The New York Times in 2007, MSCL is "watershed television," innovative in its determination to document "the experience of adolescence outside the bounds of artifice, peril and pathology that had provided the context for nearly every other depiction of teenagers on television."3 Underwriting Bellafante's claim is a sense that MSCL broke the genre form of the teen TV series by introducing another generic mode into it: realism.4 

Broke, though, not in the sense of shattered so much as the sense of cracked open. Genre, of course, is always slippery, always susceptible to such fissures. As Jason Mittell writes, genres are "discursive clusters" that are "contingent and transitory, shifting over time."5 In other words, as many others have argued, genres are useful fictions, always ready to be updated. But even by these capacious standards, the teen drama itself is not a genre that feels particularly coherent. The Wikipedia page for "List of teen dramas,"6 for instance, includes shows as varied as Showtime's Yellowjackets (only half about teenagers, and much more about cannibalism), Apple TV+'s The Buccaneers (an extremely loose7 adaptation of Edith Wharton's unfinished novel set in the 1870s), and Netflix's Dash and Lily (a Christmas-themed romcom). Whether the genre is defined by being about teens or for them remains in question. But by locating the generic center simply in a vague idea of adolescence, the teen drama makes itself amenable to all kinds of genre fusion. It contains multitudes—historical marriage markets and high school dances, football and fangs, cannibalism and Christmas. 

Despite the haphazard litmus test for the genre being "about or for teens," many teen drama programs are less "teen," more "drama." Lean too far into amenability to other genres, and you get something like Riverdale, which careens from being a Twin Peaks-meets-Archie Comics riff to incorporating everything and the kitchen sink — it's by turns a musical, a dark academia flavored Donna Tartt ripoff, a superhero saga, a time travel show, and more, to ever-diminishing returns (there are also serial killers and maple syrup aliens). Riverdale, of course, takes this ardor for fusion to uncharted heights, but many teen dramas go similarly off the rails in their own ways (remember when Landry from Friday Night Lights committed murder? Or when Dawson's Creek killed off Dawson's dad because he reached for his dropped ice cream cone while driving? Or when that dog ate Dan's heart transplant on One Tree Hill?). 

I recount these hyperbolic examples to highlight the ways that My So-Called Life is somewhat unique in its commitment to realism. As Amelie Gillette writes, "Not many teen dramas attempt to capture what it's like to be a teenager without the filter of nostalgia (The Wonder Years, Freaks & Geeks), or exaggerated elements like excessive wealth (The OC, Gossip Girl), or cartoony, soapy elements (Beverly Hills: 90210)."8 In contrast, My So-Called Life is about getting lower grades on tests than your supposed "potential" suggests, about getting a zit that destroys your self esteem, about how your hair might be holding you back (but changing your hair might make you look like a stranger to your mother). It's about how teenage life is throttled by the feeling Angela describes in the show's first two minutes: "Things were getting to me. Just how people are. How they always expect you to be a certain way." 

In other words, MSCL rightly ascertains that for many people, a lot of early teenage life is about waiting for — hoping for — something to happen to you. As Angela says in the show's seventh episode: "I thought at least by the age of 15, I would have a love life. I don't even have a like life." MSCL perhaps shares a distant family resemblance with Seinfeld in its ability to make "nothing" interesting—as MSCL writer Jason Katims shared in an oral history of the show for Elle, producer "Ed Zwick said that our goal was to tell as little story as possible."9 MSCL explores what it means to represent the everyday nothings of teenaged life, to foreground the workings of its characters' inner worlds over the churn of plot twists. 

Waiting for things to happen, though, doesn't necessarily make for gripping TV. Perhaps this partially explains why so few shows have picked up MSCL's model for the teen drama, turning instead to the plot-heavy potential of things like having two brothers in love with you at your summer house, having two vampire brothers in love with you, being really rich in New York City, or being really rich in California. 

But it doesn't explain it completely. In the story of the TV teen drama's development as a genre in the U.S., MSCL still stands out for its commitment to realist representation of teenage life, teenage angst, and teenage inner worlds. Tellingly, in 2014, Emily St. James wrote an essay titled "My So-Called Life Set the Path All Teen Shows Would Follow," but that same essay's first sentence declares that "there's never quite been a series like it."10 Of course, there are series more similar to it than others—like its predecessor The Wonder Years and successor Freaks and Geeks, both of which share MSCL's interest in documenting what it means to be a teenager in a particular moment in time.11 But despite MSCL's influence on the teen drama as a genre, its imitators seem to have more or less left its commitment to realism — as well as its assertion that real life teen drama can stand on its own and is worthy of depiction — behind.  

So why is the sincere treatment of teenage minutiae (and especially teenage angst) the residue, rather than the nucleus, of the genre? How did we get from My So-Called Life to Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, or Outer Banks? While no one narrative can encompass the story of the dilation of a genre, and its general movement from one aesthetic vocabulary to another, taking MSCL as a touchpoint helps illuminate the contours of the genre it helped inaugurate. MSCL is both definition point and departure point for the development of the teen drama — which itself indexes any number of social, cultural, and generic transformations. 

One such transformation, of course, is the profound changes in television production over the past half-century — of the ebbs and flows of the imperatives of the market, and of the shifts in television form and content from the network era to the multi-channel era to the post-network12 or streaming era. The burgeoning options offered by the multi-channel era (and the overwhelming glut of the streaming era) seem to propagate a logic of genre as copies of copies, recurring tropes spun around in the blender of the now eight to twelve episode season. The law of recent American media culture seems to be: if people seem to like it, simply make more of it — the returns will never diminish! If The OC is popular, let's make a reality TV version for cheaper.13 The MCU and the Disney-Star Wars universe both seem to be galaxies with no end to their expansion in sight. So one simple transformation to account for is the Buffy effect. Of course, when Buffy premiered just two years after MSCL's cancellation, to high ratings, critical approval, and enough academic interest to spark undergraduate courses, an academic association, and multiple scholarly journals,14 it's unsurprising that it might have sparked a turn to the supernatural in teen storytelling. 

But the post-Buffy (and later, post-Twilight) popularity of the fantasy teen drama is more than a simple market imperative. Where Winnie Holzman (creator of MSCL) spun stories out of zits and mother-daughter fashion shows, Buffy creator Joss Whedon famously used his show's monster-of-the-week villains as metaphors for adolescence.15 Putting Buffy in conversation with MSCL, then, reveals that the turn to fantasy is also a turn to metaphor. And teen fantasy dramas are thick with such metaphors—the most persistent and recurrent being the vampire who just might kill you if you let him love you. (Even in the vampire-less shows, we can see echoes of this archetype — in Gossip Girl, for instance, your bad boy boyfriend might not suck your blood, but he might trade you to his uncle for a hotel).  

The genre drift from realism to fantasy-as-metaphor suggests that the teen drama has increasingly chosen to represent teen experience obliquely, via relations between genres and metaphor or allegory rather than realist representation. MSCL's model, where teen feelings can be recognized as simultaneously massive and ultimately low-stakes, recedes to the background, in favor of allegoric gesture that inflates the stakes at the level of plot to the level of their feeling. The discordance between feeling and circumstance that MSCL so lovingly documents is resolved in favor of a seamless synergy of scale. 

When the content of the teen drama is literally life-and-death, the capriciousness and melodrama of teen feeling might seem more befitting — freed from the uncomfortable fact of so much teenaged angst being both palpably real for those who experience it and ultimately also often disjointed from the scale of the circumstances that produce it. So perhaps another way to think about this turn is the retreat of a cultural premium on sincerity and earnestness. If the prototypical-to-the-point-of-parody fear of the 90s was "selling out," danah boyd suggests that teens today don't even know what the term "sellout" means.16 Dan Brooks goes further, suggesting that the idea of "selling out" no longer even makes sense as a concept.17 In a profoundly commercialized, increasingly privatized, contracting world, who could really blame anyone else for selling out? Selling out is less a moral/aesthetic compromise, and more a reasonable way of making a living. While authenticity remains a buzzword for the contemporary moment,18 today's teen dramas employ a kind of ironic, winking sensibility around the sincere hyperbole of teen feeling. If irony, as MSCL's Brian so cogently puts it, is "when you realize, like, the component of weirdness in a situation," the characters of today's teen dramas are desperately aware of the component of weirdness of being a character in a teen drama. Look no further than perhaps the most iconic moment of Riverdale, in which Cole Sprouse's Jughead Jones declares: "In case you haven't noticed, I'm weird. I'm a weirdo. I don't fit in. And I don't want to fit in. Have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on? That's weird." 

This moment is a meme. But I also think it says something about the contemporary teen drama's orientation to itself — how much it has changed since My So-Called Life. Jughead's "stupid hat," after all, is a relic of Riverdale's origin as an adaptation of Archie comics. In other words, the turn from "I don't want to fit in" (relatable teen sentiment, one that might be shared by the likes of Angela, Rayanne, and Rickie) to "Have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on?" (self-aware character tipping their hat, pun intended, to the IP they originated in) registers the transformations of the teen drama from the 90s to the present.  

Riverdale is earnest in its own way, in the sense that it's committed to its own bit. But its earnestness could never be mistaken for the earnestness of casting Juliana Hatfield as a "musical ghost angel,"19 or of basing whole episodes around relatively innocuous school bathroom scrawlings. These are two different strains of earnestness entirely, and they could never be mistaken for one another. 

Their brands of teenage angst could also never be mistaken for each other. While so many post-00s teen dramas (as befits their turn toward fantasy, sci-fi, soap opera, and dystopia) emphasize external antagonists and "big bads," My So-Called Life deliberately grounds itself in its characters' internal worlds. Angela wants to embrace the cool, alternative Rayanne, but can't quite leave behind the more basic Sharon and Brian. She wants Jordan Catalano to tell her that she's so beautiful it hurts to look at her, but can't yet "go all the way." She's oblivious to Brian's long-suffering crush on her, she loves a plaid dress, and she thinks her parents could never understand her. Angela's angst is more or less objectless; it's directed at the condition of adolescence, in which "People are always saying you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something. Like you know what it is even." Tellingly, we encounter Angela's inner monologue more often than we encounter her expressing her inner world to other people. 

In contrast, the angst of the likes of the casts of Gossip Girl or Riverdale has external objects. Veronica Lodge has angst not because her mom just doesn't get her, but because her dad is a drug dealer trying to destroy the town to replace its public school with a for-profit private prison; Betty Cooper has angst because her dad is a serial killer who passed the "serial killer gene" on to her. Other teen dramas are not quite so baroque, but the turn to justified, external angst remains. (Think, for example, of Nate Archibald's arc in the first season of Gossip Girl, where he discovers his father is addicted to cocaine and guilty of embezzlement.) It's not only that your parents don't understand you—it's more often that they're evil and/or dead. Something closer to justifiable indignation, rather than objectless angst, results.[Text Wrapping Break] 

In other words: just as the realist is replaced by the allegorical, the internal drama is displaced to the external. This turn to the external coincides with the rise of teen culture going public via social media platforms and smartphones. Whereas young people's culture, especially young girls' culture, historically often resided in the private space of the bedroom, as Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber's canonical account goes,20 portable technology has blurred the boundaries of the public and private, and blasted the preoccupations of adolescents into the cultural mainstream. (Look no further than endless explainer articles of teen TikTok trends to prove my point.) At the same time, adolescence itself has dilated, expanded, trickling increasingly into what was once adulthood, creating a whole generation of "25-year-old teenaged girls."   

This is not to say that My So-Called Life has no clearer inheritors, or that the teen drama has become worse for its pivots to the supernatural or the soapy. (I myself am an avid fan and defender of The OC, and was devastated by the cancellation of Netflix's lesbian vampire teen drama First Kill.) In fact, we might recognize a resurgence of something closer to MSCL's mode in the teen TV of the past five or so years — think Netflix's Heartstopper or Never Have I Ever, or Hulu's Love, Victor. These shows not only follow in MSCL's footsteps of taking the minor ebbs and flows of teen feeling seriously, they also follow in MSCL's pathbreaking representational politics.  

At the same time, though, these series seem to have an interest in aestheticizing teen life, rather than documenting the aesthetics of teen life. Heartstopper (drawing from its origins as a webcomic and a graphic novel) punctuates its central characters' feelings with superimposed doodles of stars, leaves, and hearts, and Love, Victor can't resist prismatic rainbow filters and non-diegetic synths. Further, as Kyle Lindsey has argued, Heartstopper's reception has burdened the show with "the task of being a standardized piece of queer representation on-screen and off,"21 illustrating how easily contemporary teen dramas are swept up into platform logics. In some ways, shows like Heartstopper, Never Have I Ever, and Love, Victor point to how far the teen drama has come since My So-Called Life; in other ways, they point to how much further we have to go. 

As the genre of the teen drama continues to broaden, perhaps these new, mellower teen dramas signal the possibility of a return to MSCL's vision of teen life. But even if not, I hope today's teens find their way to My So-Called Life as I did. They might see something of their bizarre, alienated lives in it. 

---

Olivia Stowell (Twitter: @oliviastowell Bluesky: @oliviastowell.bsky.social) is a PhD candidate in the department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, where she researches contemporary television and popular culture. Her dissertation project explores discursive formations of race and racism in relation to gender, labor, genre, and regulation in post-2020 U.S. reality TV. She is also the TV/Film Editor at Mid Theory Collective. Her writing has appeared in Critical Studies in Television, Television and New Media, Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, FLOW, and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at olivia-stowell.com

---

References