When I was 13, I watched all six seasons of Gossip Girl in three weeks. I was addicted—Serena, Blair, and their friends appeared to be living the ultimate dream. Their lives were dramatic, romantic, full of parties and designer fashion, and I couldn’t help but dream up my own high school life unfolding the same way. But the older I got, the more I understood how much reality those shows missed. Shows like Gossip Girl and Friday Night Lights present teen life as being one giant, emotional rollercoaster where relationships and popularity are everything, while homework, familial obligations, and self-improvement are mentioned almost as afterthoughts.
Teen dramas have a standard script. They typically happen in upper-middle-class suburbs, with characters who never seem to have anything but time to waste on spontaneous escapades, hot breakups, and in-depth coffee conversations. There is a great emphasis on sex and romance, but hardly any on the mundane things most teenagers are coping with. The reality is that high school life is more about coping with school stress, determining your future, and surviving random social turmoil, not drinking lattes after school while juggling a multitude of love interests.
One of the biggest issues with these shows is how they portray sex and relationships. An article in The Journal for Sex Research examined hit teen TV shows of the early 2000s and discovered that the majority of teen characters on these shows were sexually active. Barely any had ambiguous or non-sexual plotlines. It’s not inherently wrong to depict teens in sexual relationships, but how it’s presented is misleading. These programs generally handle sex this way as the ultimate rite of passage, like once you’ve done it, you’re officially grown-up. But getting older isn’t that easy.
Take the case of Friday Night Lights. The program dedicates a great deal of coverage to characters such as Julie and Matt as they struggle with deciding whether or not to have sex. And although the show does attempt to portray the emotional aspect of it, it falls into the same trap as everything else in terms of making sex seem like the make-or-break moment in a teenager’s life. That does make actual-life teens feel behind or do something wrong if they don’t exactly have what’s happening on screen.
How relationships are depicted is another problem. Many of the male characters behave in ways that, frankly, wouldn’t work in real life—being emotionally cold, manipulative, or just plain rude—but somehow manage to get the girl anyway. In Friday Night Lights, there’s this entire “rally girl” culture where girls wait on the football players and fawn over them. The show does mention how crazy that is, but it doesn’t do much to subvert the message as a whole.
Of course, not all teenagers are watching these shows straight-faced. Teens generally know fantasy from reality, according to Yale psychology professor BJ Casey. Nevertheless, such shows provide a sort of cultural background that can impact the way teens view themselves and their relationships. A study published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health discovered that teens who viewed large amounts of sex on television were more likely to regret their sexual experiences. That implies that those shows can contribute to the pressure and confusion most teens already have.
The better news? Times are shifting. Programs like Sex Education are turning the narrative around by being honest and honest-like. Rather than portraying it all as romanticized, these shows reveal the awkward, emotional, and often humorous aspects of growing up. Teens like Otis, who’s not self-assured and is clumsy around people, seem like real characters. The program speaks candidly about topics like consent, sexuality, and psychological issues, and it does it both humorously and from the heart.
For many of us, teen drama shows were central to how we envisioned ourselves while growing up. They provided a model for what to relate to—or at least what to imagine. But enjoyable as they might be, teen drama shows set us up to expect things in high school and later life that no real-world life can provide. High school is not going to be perfect or dramatic, and that’s fine. It’s not about perfecting a TV ideal of how to grow up. It’s about discovering who you are, even if it means making errors, asking cringeworthy questions, or being completely lost at times. That’s where the real story starts.
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