Teen TV

Stefania Marghitu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351859677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Teen TV explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and teen media.

Organized chronologically to cover each generation since the inception of the medium in the 1940s, the book examines a wide range of historical and contemporary programming: from the broadcast bottleneck, multi-channel era that included youth-targeted spaces like MTV, the WB, and the CW, to the rise of streaming platforms and global crossovers. It covers the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming-of-age story, and the prevalent genre formations of teen TV and milestones faced by teen characters. The book also includes interviews with creators and showrunners of hit network television teen series, including Degrassi 's Linda Schuyler, and the costume designer that established a heightened turn in the significance of teen fashion on the small screen in Gossip Girl, Eric Daman.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and teachers interested in television aesthetics, TV genres, pop culture, and youth culture, as well as media and television studies.

1

Baby Boomer Teen TV

This chapter explores the converging histories of the concept of the American teenager and the emergence of television as a central mass media form—a form that went on to have a profound influence on this new demographic. The chapter places Baby Boomer teens as the first generation that grew up and came of age with the television medium. In this respect, television and popular music also have closely intertwined histories, with both attracting large teen audiences. The chapter sheds light on the type of teen TV shows Baby Boomers were first exposed to; these shows were some of the earliest examples of the genre and included teen serialized soap operas and episodic situational comedies. The chapter also establishes both the foundational teen archetypes and key narrative arcs in the genre, discussing how early iterations of teen TV balanced conforming to societal norms and subverting them so as to adhere to shifts in youth point of view. As such, the genre reflects both the ideological messages that the generation received from the type of programming targeting them during their adolescence, and the rebellious spirit of the burgeoning 1960s counterculture that cut against the grain of those messages.

In addition, the chapter reviews the initial association of TV with youth music, on such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971, CBS), American Bandstand (1952–1989, ABC), and Soul Train (1971–2006), which deal with men as stars and young girls as fans. As Susan J. Douglas argues, what is looked back upon as pathbreaking during the era in question are the boys—James Dean, Elvis, and The Beatles. This is “because what film and TV recorded girls doing those years—teasing our hair, chasing The Beatles, and doing the watusi in bikinis—was silly, mindless and irrelevant to history”.¹ By the same token, however, “we must reject the notion that popular culture for girls and women didn’t matter.”² The history of foundational teen situational comedy programs will also be reviewed here, with a focus on Dobie Gillis (1959–1963, CBS) and Gidget (1965–1966, ABC), in the 1960s, followed by Welcome Back Kotter in the 1970s (1975–1979, ABC). Dobie established the televisual archetypes in the genre that would dominate characterization in subsequent programming, while Kotter reflected 1970s socially conscious programming and a shift away from focusing on white, upper-middle-class teens. Gidget, for its part, reveals a girl-centered space where the Malibu teen was both mischievous enough to provide suitable material for a situational comedy, but also mature enough to be a rare example of a confident teen girl who is seeking to date boys and gain independence from her family. Further, as a surfer girl, Gidget engaged in the sport alongside boys, rather than looking at them admiringly from the sand; in this way, she defied the “beach bunny” trope. However, the short run of the series indicates how difficult it was to place Gidget in broadcast programming, although the revival of the franchise through re-boots, spinoffs, and remakes indicates the lasting influence that the independent teen had on young girls. Gidget is just one of many transmedia texts of the franchise that spanned from the 1950s to the 1980s, and it constitutes an early example of teen-girl media culture. In Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise, which uncovers the 40 years that the surfer girl character captured audiences through novels, film, television, comics, board games, parodies, and more, Wojcik also contextualizes the cultural specificity of Gidget by situating it in an intertextual network that included such competitors as the Tammy series, La Dolce Vita, and The Patty Duke Show. An approach of this sort allows us “to better understand Gidget’s meaning at different points in time, and also its uniqueness as a representation of teen girlhood.”³

From 1941 to 1945, radio was a key platform for Americans seeking out news about World War II, but it also broadcast early fictional programming. Radio established foundations for the soap opera, situational comedy, and variety show genres later broadcast on TV. Before television, radio established the blueprint for TV broadcasting, including its dominant situational comedy and serialized soap opera genres. Meet Corliss Archer (1943–1946) stands out as an early teen radio serial and transmedia example. F. Hugh Herbert introduced Corliss Archer in a magazine story series. This led to Shirley Temple playing Corliss in the 1945 film Kiss and Tell, followed by a 1949 sequel titled A Kiss for Corliss. Magazine stories, comics, and literary adaptations would become standard models for television formulas, including the teen TV genre.

Baby Boomers are defined as the generation born directly after World War II, between 1946 and 1964. This boom also coincides with the postwar prosperity of the suburbs in the US, which allowed for the proliferation of televisions in suburban homes. The increasing number of televisions would have a huge impact on teenagers, who were a burgeoning market due to their newfound income. The Boomer generation, then, coincides with the rise of television and advertising culture. Teen-specific clothing, magazines, books, music, film, and of course, television, began to be created specifically for this generation.

Literary Precedents from the 1940s to the 1960s: The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew

Twentieth-century literary precedents for teen TV are evident in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew book series, as well as Archie Comics, although their TV adaptations initially came in the form of animated programming. The first Hardy Boys installment was published in 1929, and Nancy Drew, centering on the Hardy Boys’ female counterpart, was released the year after. This pattern of teen-boy original and girl spinoffs would be repeated in teen TV as well. The Hardy Boys took a new direction in 1959, with the series aiming both to eliminate its original racial stereotypes and to serve as a competitor to television. In 1969, The Hardy Boys animated program premiered on ABC, as a direct competitor to ABC’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969). The series only lasted a season, but it is known for including one of the first black characters on Saturday morning TV and for its incorporation of filmation, in which the opening credits were shot in live-action rather than animated. Designed to appeal to those who liked the co-ed ensemble cast featured in Scooby-Doo and subsequent programming, the crossover live-action The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries aired from 1977 to 1979 on ABC. By its third and last season, the series was only called The Hardy Boys. Just as The Hardy Boys book series endured from 1929 to 2005, The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories lasted from 1930 to 2003, but its onscreen adaptations never succeeded, despite several attempts in the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s. Most recently, the CW network premiered a new iteration of Nancy Drew in 2019 to mixed reviews and ratings; the second season will premiere in 2021. Later, in Chapter 3, I return to the trope of the teen girl detective in an analysis of the series Vernonia Mars.

The Archie Comics series proved to be more malleable to adaptations. The first Archie-based comic was released in 1941, featuring the characters of Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones. The (Archie’s Girls) Betty and Veronica series premiered in 1942 and was based on the dual “best friends” and “enemies” positions the two girls shared, given that they were caught up in a love triangle with Archie. Jughead’s own series (Archie’s Pal), Jughead Jones, premiered in 1949. The spinoff comic Sabrina the Teenage Witch premiered in 1962 and was adapted into three different animated series across four decades—Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1970–1974, CBS), Sabrina, The Animated Series (1999–2000, UPN/ABC), and Sabrina: The Secrets of a Teenage Witch (2013–2014, The Hub Network)—as well as two live-action series, namely, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003, ABC/WB) and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–, Netflix). In Chapter 4, I further discuss the rebranding of Archie Comics and explore the synergy between the series Riverdale (2017–, CW) and Netflix’s Sabrina.

By the 1960s, the influence of rock ‘n’ roll music, the counterculture, and the civil rights movement were evident in television programming. Aniko Bodroghkozy asserts that in order to cater to the Baby Boomer demographic, 1960s television essentially had to concede to calls to air programming that reflected youthful rebellion and social and political change through the hippie counterculture, the antiwar movement, campus protests, and guerilla civil rights.⁴ Hence, despite broadcast TV’s initial reluctance to show Elvis and The Beatles onscreen, their television appearances gave them exposure to a wide audience and led to subsequent success. At the same time, this chapter also delves into the complex racial politics of these popular music series. The battle for desegregation onscreen on Bandstand revealed how broadcast executives and their advertisers aimed to keep programming white due not only to political pressure but also to financial incentives. Although Bandstand eventually agreed to show popular Black musicians on the air, it was not until the late 1960s that they began to show white and Black teens dancing together onscreen. The racial politics of music programming were further highlighted by t...