Wheaton News

Reflection explores loss of TV shows that capture ‘what it means to be young’

Wheaton College Assistant Professor of English Wesley Jacques recently reflected on the ending of network and cable television shows aimed at teenagers and young adults in an essay in Slate magazine, which provides analysis and commentary about politics, news, business, technology and culture.

In his piece, “The Last Bell: TV was once replete with shows that reflected and prescribed what it meant to be a teen. Not anymore,” Jacques wrote:

“Recently, I’ve felt that the TV landscape, in all its modern sensibilities, seems to be closing the book on a particular image of what it means to be young—no longer a child, but not quite an adult. Teen TV was once as triumphant as it was confounding; to see it become an endangered species is as alarming as it is depressing.”

He takes readers on a trip down memory lane of television’s evolution—from “Little House on the Prairie,” “The Facts of Life,” “Saved by the Bell” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” right up to “Grown-ish” and HBO’s “Euphoria.”

Jacques also notes that in a Tik Tok world, where immediate gratification is on demand on handheld screens, it is not surprising that there has been a shift in the TV landscape. Yet, he laments the shift and explores the implications.

“Ultimately what we lose as teen television passes on is not the inherent difficulty of teenage realities coping with relationships, identity, bodies, and an unfortunately bleak outlook for the environmental and geopolitical future. What we lose is the liminal space that made reality itself most malleable,” he wrote.

“Teenage audiences may have existed in the nickelodeon theaters of the early 20th century, where, for five cents, you could catch a scenic or vaudeville moving picture in cities throughout the country long before the youth-oriented cable network borrowed the moniker. But what television offered teendom was a sort of cultural synchronicity where the images of a youthful rebellion and romance were perhaps erroneously descriptive, but enchantingly prescriptive of a collective reality that viewers were in the midst of together.”