High school: a four (or five, that’s okay) year chunk of life that is supposed to be the best time of your life. Or was that university? Or was it your early twenties? Frankly, I haven’t the slightest clue – every phase of life that I go through someone seems to tell me that it is the definitive “time of my life”. Funny, they don’t make that many shows about unemployed university grads. In any case, high school drama – the catty immaturity, the questionable fashion choices, the breakups, the friends forever delusion and sometimes even the educational portion make for riveting television. However, the CW network has low standards for what riveting really means. Ah, the CW, the amalgamation of The WB and UPN, whose bread and butter survives off of ridiculously good looking 20-somethings trying their best to suppress their chest hair to conceivably pass as sweet, naïve teenagers.
So why do we still watch? Just exactly who are we defined as, anyway? What age brackets are actually watching these shows? Are there enough 12-17 year old girls to drive Nielsen ratings? I can only surmise as to why those who are no longer in high school enjoy their primetime teen soaps.
We can start with those ridiculously good looking 20-somethings. I remember when “Degrassi: The Next Generation” first came out in 2001. They have kids who are just about the right age to play their teenaged counterparts, give or take one or two years. I think the first set of kids were supposed to be in grade 7 or 8 or something but for some reason I couldn’t wrap my head around how young the kids looked, so I wasn’t interested. Plus, it was so much more interesting to see what indecisive antics Joey Potter was up to that week on the creek, because she looked much more like the teen I strove to look like (less so now, trust me). Perhaps somehow in my nostalgia, I try to forget that I was an awkward, rail-thin, flat-chested teen and rather imagine myself as the curvy and leggy Serena Van der Woodsen. At least, I’m still awkward, that’s how I keep it real.
And high school was all about trying interpret your own sense of style, which really meant being trying to be trendy (I can explain the difference to you, I mean other than the well-known Yves Saint Laurent quote). So seeing the impeccably well dressed characters on “Gossip Girl” reinforces that I too wore the bare minimum to resemble my school uniform, always had perfectly blown out hair and never had a bad experiment with over-tweezing my eyebrows. Television also has a glossing effect by making everyone seem all that much quicker and wittier in high school. Everyone has snappier comebacks that we only wish we could have been instead of standing there slack jawed and pausing frequently in uncomfortable silences. A ridiculous number of cultural references are made in conversation that everyone else always seems to understand, and trust me; kids of today are investing their free times watching the shows you’re on, so they probably don’t have the mental capacity to process your Trotsky references. They have the lyrics of “I’m on a Boat” stored in their amygdala. Sorry. Perhaps the least realistic show with respect to dialogue had to be “Dawson’s Creek”, because no one ever talks like that. But I did learn some of my favourite vocabulary words from that show, and what is trash television if not for expanding the vernacular of their young viewers?
Most high school shows also tend to spare us freshman year, which if you’re most people is a year you probably want to forget anyway. Freshman year doesn’t make for good TV; it’s always better that we meet a group of already established friends and maybe throw one or two transfer students into their mix. And somehow, at one point, the heroine is always crowned homecoming or prom queen even if no one likes her (but the high school crowd is fickle, you see). We get to see our dream of being the captain of the [insert team sport here], cheerleader, top of our class, prom queen or valedictorian (sometimes several permutations of those options) all through the comfort of our own couches because we were probably pretty average ourselves.
And maybe it’s just me, but does it seem like shows jump the shark when the characters move to college/university? (Jump the shark, so you know, is a term that refers to the moment when a show rapidly declines thereafter. It references when the Fonz is about to jump over a shark on water skis on “Happy Days”, subsequently when the show went over its peak. See? Television can teach you things.) Maybe it is like real life, where everything seems all the more farfetched when the protective guise of high school is lifted. When you’re in high school you are the only fish in the pond, so it seems likely that in a small building/Podunk town, you are bound to run into the same people all the time. However, it’s convenient when ‘Fictional Institution C’ has always been right around the corner and magically all of our heroes and heroines are all on the same floor of their co-ed dorm? You don’t say?
I guess that’s what television is for: entertainment and escapism. Sign me up for those double Es. It’s no surprise that when I graduated high school I was voted to most likely “be hired by FOX to consult on tv dramas” (or something very similar to that), because I know my stuff -- that's pretty much like prom queen, right? That and TV dramas are incredibly formulaic, especially on FOX (Glee notwithstanding, watch Glee!). Be that as it may, I’ll be watching my high school drama for at least few more years, but I think my Facebook marriage is bound to last longer. That’s a real commitment.
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