The premise of Wednesday, newly returned to Netflix, is that the unsettling gothette invented by Charles Addams, the New Yorker magazine cartoonist, almost a century ago is now a teenager at Loreto on the Green or some other exclusive private school that supposedly caters to supernatural outcasts.
First things first: these people aren’t real outcasts. To echo the great Chris Fleming, hair dye, vintage dresses and a deadpan delivery do not “outcasts” make. I’m from Kildare. You should see the freaks who inhabited my school. It was like a zoo. Even the “cool kids” looked like misshapen wanted posters compared to these glossy emo tryhards. Outcasts my hoop.
Nerds and freaks have long been in the ascendant in the world of teen dramas. Now they have a whole school to themselves. They roam the halls distributing dead arms to terrified jocks. It’s high time that someone made a film called Dead Athletes Society, about a bunch of delicate sportsers inspired to impassioned grunting by a monosyllabic ape.
Anyway, today I’m going to do a deep dive on the teen-drama genre and how it has changed over the years.
We already have Great House Revival. What we need now is Feck the Preservation Order, Let’s Knock It and Build an Office Block
The jock, the nerd, the rebel, the princess and the freak: What kind of teenager were you?
The Music Quiz: Rock band Biffy Clyro formed in which Scottish town in 1995?
The Traitors: My favourite character is Eamon, who is being radicalised before our eyes
Hamlet
Shakespeare invented the teen drama. Romeo and Juliet, which was turned into a Day-Glo Baz Luhrmann film, is essentially how everyone sees their first relationship. The Taming of the Shrew became the excellent teen drama 10 Things I Hate About You.
But the best of all is Hamlet, in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father basically says “Avenge me” and the teenage Hamlet responds like my nephew does when he’s told “Tidy your room.”
“You’re not the boss of me!” Hamlet yells in ye olden-day English and then spends the play in a sulk. He puts off the task at hand for ages, ignores a manic pixie dream girl (Ophelia) who fancies him and forces his family to watch a play he wrote (very relatable) before murdering a bunch of people more or less accidentally because of his shoddy execution of the chore his apparitional parent set him.
Hamlet is essentially Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off mixed with Kevin the Teenager and the Unabomber.
Muppet Babies
Everyone under 30 looks the same to me, especially when muppets. Are these “muppets” in a high school or a creche? Sure it’s the same thing when it comes to the cosseted members of Gen Z, says you.
John Hughes movies
Teenagers were invented in the 1950s by advertising boffins, but nobody thought to catalogue and taxonomise them until John Hughes began his important work in the 1980s.
Through a sequence of films including Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, Hughes, wearing a white coat and holding a clipboard, realised that teenagers came in five distinct forms: sleepy, grumpy, bashful, dopey ... Wait, that’s the seven dwarfs. I mean the jock, the nerd, the rebel, the princess and the freak.
This formed the basis of the teen drama for decades to follow, a classical template from which few have wavered.
Scooby-Doo
What if we put all of those types in a van with a talking dog and got them to solve crime? Good question, professor! And so Scooby-Doo was born. (Yes, I know that Scooby-Doo precedes those John Hughes films, but pointing that out makes you a nerd, and it’s now my duty to bully you.)
Beverly Hills 90210
In the early 1990s the hierarchy of these teenage types was clear. There were cool kids (the 90210 protagonists Brandon and Brenda and most of their friends), and off to the side were James Dean-esque rebels (Dylan) and nerds (Andrea) who knew their subordinate position.
Freaks basically didn’t really exist (except in one episode where The Flaming Lips were the special guests at the Peach Pit). Furthermore, all of them were to be played, much like Hamlet, by people with mortgages and children and receding hairlines.
This had a huge influence on other teen dramas, such as Last of the Summer Wine. (I refer those of you quibbling with this chronology to the bit in parentheses in the previous section.)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Joss Whedon’s epic vampire-fighting teen drama changed the culture in a bunch of ways. It was the first breakthrough phenomenon to explicitly say, Isn’t being a teenager much like fighting vampires or being in a hunger game or whatever? And now we’re drowning in fantastical teen power fantasies. It also introduced a quippy, self-aware sensibility to the culture that was refreshing at first but became tiresome. (See also: superhero movies.)
Skins and, later, Euphoria
There’s a subset of teen dramas in which the conceit is “check out the wild and shocking young people with their reckless drugs and sex, which they have totally invented!”
Skins did a pretty good, moving job of exploring this for Channel 4 in the early part of the century. In the world of Skins the teens existed in a strange, almost fantastical adult-free netherworld.
Euphoria went somewhere similar but somehow turned it into something queasier. “The main thing is that we make this programme about vulnerable teenagers as sexually explicit as possible,” they said, and we all felt a bit ill.
My So-Called Life and, later, Freaks and Geeks
Skins and Euphoria sometimes feigned realism but were, in fact, as heightened as Scooby-Doo. Winnie Holzman’s My So-Called Life and Paul Feig’s Freaks and Geeks presented us with something more realistic and sweet, with vulnerable characters who looked and acted like real, unworldly teens. Sadly, that’s not what those idiots the general public wanted, and they both only lasted a season each.
The OC, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl
By the time of The OC, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl a “teenager” was basically the equivalent of a “cowboy” or a “spaceman” or an “orc”, a completely fictional construct with no basis in reality.
Nobody cared any more whether a “teenager” was played by an actual teen or a horse or somebody in their late 80s, as long as they performed it all between quotation marks and respected the formal boundaries of the genre. The OC, in particular, pointed towards a new teenage hegemony where the heroes were nerds and the cool kids were to be pitied.
Behind the scenes of our culture Mark Zuckerberg was rubbing his hands and laughing evilly.
Riverdale
In Riverdale the teen drama delightfully eats itself. A postmodern, self-aware romp through the 1950s Archie comics in which the teen stars of another age, from the John Hughes muse Molly Ringwald to the 90210 star Luke Perry, turn up in the parent roles. It’s the revisionist western of the genre.
Superhero movies: we’re all teenagers now
A bunch of people with no real adult responsibilities and ridiculous clothes hang out uttering deadpan zingers before dealing with crises that feel like the end of the world.
Everyone in contemporary culture is basically a teenager now. The Buffyfication of everything had started well before Joss Whedon wrote and directed the first Avengers movie, but now every office bore and television columnist narrates their life with reference to pop-cultural tropes, and grown men all over the city wear shorts. It’s just not on.
Anyway, as the office jock, I’m off to bully that nerd Fintan O’Toole. See you next week.
