Teen Drama

Devi: No, man. We're watching Riverdale. Buckle up for some steamy teen romance.
Kamala: These are high schoolers? And their parents are okay with them taking showers together in their homes?
Devi: Yeah, Kamala. Welcome to American teen soaps. The actors are also older than Mom.

— Never Have I Ever

Any show where the central focus is on teenagers, their angst, pimples, and/or clothes. Best describes shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Dawson's Creek (or anything else on The WB or The CW, really). Most likely place to find the Very Special Episode.

The kind of show where everyone looks too old and too short to be teenagers, they have to bring new people in, the men keep taking their shirts off, there are no more than two non-white main characters, the teens talk much more like adults than teenagers, and anyone over a specific age is bad news.

See also Kid Com which also features teenage protagonists and many of the same tropes, but generally in a far more light hearted manner. Young Adult fiction is the rough literary equivalent of the teen drama. Compare Soap Opera and Prime Time Soap.

When the lens is reversed to focus on the flaws of the kids' entire families, it's Stepford Suburbia.

See Tween Drama for the child-friendly equivalent to the Teen Drama.

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Examples:

• 7th Heaven, mixed with religion.
• 13 Reasons Why
• All American
• All American: Homecoming, though it's set in college.
• All of Us Are Dead, deals with the social problems of south-Korean teenagers, albeit in a zombie setting.
• Al Rawabi School For Girls
• American Vandal
• Andi Mack, a Kid Com that's growing up fast. An ongoing Story Arc will do that.
• Awkward.
• Baby
• The Best Years — made in Canada, set in Boston, Massachusetts.
• Beverly Hills, 90210, both the trope codifying original and the revival.
• Bittersweet Candy Bowl — Even if they are Funny Animals.
• Blood & Water
• Blue Water High
• Everything made by Brat.
• Breaker High
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though the main characters are in their 20s by the end)
• The Bureau of Magical Things
• Caitlin's Way
• The Carrie Diaries, the short-lived prequel to Sex and the City, focusing on a teenage Carrie Bradshaw.
• Club Der Roten Bänder
• Control Z
• Dance Academy
• Dare Me
• Dawson's Creek
• Dead Boy Detectives (2024)
• All versions of the Degrassi franchise (except the original The Kids of Degrassi Street):
  • Degrassi Junior High, the Trope Maker
  • Degrassi High
  • Degrassi: The Next Generation
• Dis/Connected
• The 21st century parts of The Dreamer can count as this.
• Elite (2018)
• The End of the F***ing World
• Everwood
• Euphoria
• Everything Now
• Everything Sucks!
• Extracurricular
• Faking It
• Fate: The Winx Saga
• Find Me In Paris
• First Kill
• Freaks and Geeks. Made by future comedy overlord Judd Apatow, and stars many actors that went on to be famous through his movies. Lasted only one season, but became a Cult Classic in the process.
• Gen V. A spin-off of The Boys set at a corporate-sponsored superhero college.
• Gigantic: the TeenNick show about the teenage children of celebrities.
• Glee, which also double as a musical with comedic elements. Well, mostly comedic.
• Glue - otherwise known as "Skins meets Broadchurch".
• Goosebumps (2023)
• Gossip Girl (2007), which was based on a book series that it has since eclipsed.
  • Gossip Girl (2021)
• Grand Army
• Grange Hill - a mixture of a teen drama and Soap Opera. First aired in the 1970s and lasted for 30 years.
• Greek, although it's set in college.
• grown•ish, though it's set in a college.
• GTO: The Early Years focuses on teenage Japanese Delinquents, and has been adapted to live-action twice.
  • The sequel Great Teacher Onizuka, which also had two Live Action Adaptations, is more of a borderline case, since the protagonist is the teens' adult teacher (who is still quite a manchild).
• H₂O: Just Add Water
• Heartbreak High (2022)
• Heartstopper
• The Heirs
• Hidden Palms
• Home Before Dark
• Howto Sell Drugs Online Fast
• I Am Frankie, same as Andi Mack above, but on Nickelodeon.
• I Am Not Okay With This
• I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021)
• Instant Star
• El internado: Las Cumbres, a teen thriller drama set in a Boarding School for "problem students" in Spain.
• Intertwined
  • Intertwined II The Lost Spirits
  • Intertwined: The Series
• Joan of Arcadia's second season.
• JONAS L.A. The prequel falls under Sitcom category.
• Khaos Komix is another webcomic example.
• Klass
• Life as We Know It
• Life Unexpected
• Looking for Alaska
• The Love of Siam
• Love, Victor
• LPS: Popular
• Misfits
• Mustangs FC - set around a newly formed all-girl soccer team, the show focuses as much on the relationships between the girls as the action on the field.
• My Mad Fat Diary
• The Mark Side - a Web Animation example that is also a comedy.
• My So-Called Life was a deconstruction of the over-the-top teen dramas of The '90s. It is also considered a classic of the genre, despite lasting only one season.
• Never Have I Ever
• The O.C.
• Odd Girl Out
• On My Block
• One of Us is Lying
• One Tree Hill
• Open Heart, which is also a Detective Drama and Medical Drama.
• Opposite Sex
• Outer Banks.
• Party of Five
• Patito Feo
• Point Pleasant
• Popular
• Power Chord: High School Musical
• Pretty Little Liars, which also started out as a book series.
  • Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin
• Privileged. Although the twins are not the main characters, their actions and crises drive a lot of the plot.
• Rebelde
  • Rebelde (2022)
• Rebelde Way. Takes place in Argentina amidst the rich kids, but it also discusses elements of the lower classes. So the idea of "rich white kids" has a different connotation in the third world than in the USA or the UK. (Not to mention the idea of light-skinned/white-passing Latinos, which are fairly common in South America but rare to see in the USA).
• Red Band Society, which is also a Medical Drama.
• Red Rose
• Reign: Unlike most of these examples, is set in the 16th Century rather than modern day.
• Rise (2018): Glee take 2.
• Riverdale: Based on Archie Comics with mystery.
• Romeo and Juliet: Older Than Steam, which just goes to show...
• Room 222
• Roswell (its 2019 reboot, in contrast, has an explicitly older cast)
• Runaways
• Second Noah
• The Secret Circle
• The Sea Beyond
• Sex Education
• The Secret Life of the American Teenager
• That '70s Show
  • That '80s Show
• Shut Up Flower Boy Band
• Skam
• Skin, a short-lived Setting Update of Romeo and Juliet.
• Skins
• Smallville was one of these, before the Sci-Fi and geeky Comic Book fanservice took over.
• South of Nowhere: A TeenNick drama. Unusual because it had a 30 running time for the most part.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles (2024)
• Star-Crossed
• Stargirl: Superhero series with a high school setting.
• The Story of Tracy Beaker. Set in a care home.
• Summertime
• Teen Wolf
• The Tribe. A post-apocalyptic teen drama from New Zealand.
• Twisted (2013)
• The Vampire Diaries
• Veronica Mars — Teen Drama meets Film Noir.
• Violetta
• The Wanderers is a teen drama about a youth gang in the Bronx.
• The Way He Looks
• Weak Hero Class 1 is an action/drama set in a school where vicious bullying always happens.
• Wednesday
• Series/Yellowjackets is divided in two timelines, the 1996 year where all the main characters are teens lost in the woods of Canada, and the 2020s, where they are all adults.
• YU+ME: dream is a Webcomic teen drama.
• Whateley Universe is a Web Original Serial Novel Teen Drama set in a Superhero School.

Parodies:

• Brilliantly spoofed in an episode of Stargate SG-1, "200", with a scene showing SG-1 recasted with "younger, edgier actors" — one of whom is a young Cory Monteith, who went on to star in an actual teen show. A lot of fans took it as a light-hearted crack at Battlestar Galactica (2003), given the similarities between the parody and the new BSG. Nowadays, this parody is often used as a Take That! towards Stargate Universe in certain sections of the fandom, as much of that stuff was actually present in SGU.
• Moody's Point, the hilariously over-the top Dawson's Creek parody on The Amanda Show.
• Teen Canyon is another Show Within a Show Dawson's Creek-like parody, this time on Disney's animated series The Weekenders.
• The O.C. had a Show Within a Show called "The Valley". The characters frequently made remarks about it that lampshaded some of the cliches teen dramas (including The O.C. itself) exhibited.
• Constantly the subject of spoof on sketch shows.
  • MADtv (1995) had one memorable sketch entitled "Pretty White Kids With Problems", which was the name of this trope's redirect.
  • Saturday Night Live, during Blake Lively's hosting gig, parodied Gossip Girl with a spinoff set in Staten Island (for those who "hate the sophistication of Manhattan").
• Heavily spoofed, along with teen movie cliches, by Not Another Teen Movie.
• Penny Arcade gave us this gem: what would Star Wars be like if it was a WB TV show?
• Clone High is entirely about spoofing the genre and its cliches (especially the Very Special Episodes.) in the most over-the-top manner possible.
• Strangers with Candy was a parody of both this and after-school specials. Most of the usual high school problems ("Am I cool? Should I rat out my friend?") belonged to the forty-six-year-old freshman main character and her teachers, while the teenage students were usually the only sane ones. There's also at least one horrible Spoof Aesop per episode.
• A Penny and Aggie strip parodied social networking sites and online media mergers by imagining them as teen drama characters.
• Sonny with a Chance had Mackenzie Falls.
• In the book Schooled by Gordon Korman, the main character Capricorn gets addicted to a show called Trigonometry and Tears, in which, from the descriptions provided, is a very over-the-top relationship show. However, since Capricorn has no TV at his real house, he thinks it's the best thing ever (and tries to talk to the character).
• Total Drama parodies both teen dramas and Reality TV. Most of the contestants are deliberately exaggerated takes on the stock characters found in teen dramas and other works about high school.
• Parodied in the first episode of Sym-Bionic Titan with "High School Heights", an over-the-top drama where teens are making out in every shot and a character's dark secret is his inability to read, airing on "The WC".
• Family Guy did it.
  Teen: Now I'm going to go to a lake and stare meaningfully at the sunset.
  Voice Over: [singing] High school is such a serious thing. These problems really matter.
• Homestuck suddenly shifts from a Genre-Busting series with a mix of sci-fi, horror and comedy to a mostly slow Teen Drama-filled (though still filled with humor and horror elements) Act 6. Knowing Andrew Hussie, this was likely intentional.
• During the 1990s run of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club; there was a recurring serial that served as a teen drama spoof called "Emerald Cove".
• One of The Lonely Island's early projects for Channel 101 was a teen drama parody called The 'Bu. (Young, sexy people that live in Malibu call it The 'Bu, because when you say the entire word, it takes time, and then you wouldn't be young anymore.)
• Skippy Dies gives the genre the Lit Fic treatment. The book's plot is basically about a group of teens' relationship and friendship dramas, which have life-or-death consequences, and the book makes use of a number of School Tropes, but this is mixed up with social commentary and a stream-of-consciousness writing style.
• Animaniacs (2020): The segment "Teeniacs" is a parody of supernatural teen dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Teen Wolf.
  Wakko: But we're only three weeks into the school year and so much as changed already. We moved to a small town, we found a treasure map, our dad was blackmailed by the guy who owns the marina, our best friend was possessed, we proved the existence of alternate haunted timelines...
  Yakko: (drives a car through the wall) And I finally got my learner's permit!
• Parodied in the Family Guy episode "Disney's The Reboot," where one of the ways Disney executives propose to reboot the show is as the more supernatural variant of this trope. "The Q" features Chris and his high school friends investigate the death of Meg by a werewolf who turns out to be Brian.

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