Teen Dramas are a right of passage for every middle to high school aged kid. That age is pumped full of hormones and confusion and the teen drama tv genre is a perfect reflection of that. The first relevant TV show that could be considered the real start of the teen drama genre is the original 90210 that started in 1990 and ended in 2000.
https://vocal.media/geeks/teen-dramas
Teen Drama Tropes;
- Love Triangle
- They are all ensemble casts, as part of growing up is figuring out who your friends are and how you fit into a group
- Time Jumps; Now not all teen dramas have these but a lot of them do and sometimes it means the death of the show. Dawson’s Creek’s time jump was awful but One Tree Hill’s was great. It really comes down to the writing.
- Ivy League; Someone in this friend group is trying to go to an Ivy League school, Blair wanted Yale, Andi wanted Stanford I think? Someone is trying to go somewhere prestigious.
- Class differences; obvious in 90210 and Gossip Girl but also very present in Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill.
Teen dramas tend to be super popular with people in their 20s as well just because you kind of go through all of that confusion and sense of feeling lost and aimless all over again in your 20s…if you are a teenager watching this I am so sorry. But there really aren’t a lot of tv shows that dive into that so most of us return to the shows we watched as teenagers to find some kind of comfort and reminder that eventually it does get better and the world starts to make more sense at some point.
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