This is less rare in the waning days of Peak TV, of course-today’s teens have grown-ish (see below), Dear White People, The Order and Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, just to name a few-but back in 2007, five years after Felicity went off the air and 30 after A Different World took its first bow, ABC Family’s Greek was pretty much without peer. While it’s true that, given enough renewals, all teen shows will eventually be backed into sending their characters to college, it is the rare teen show that starts there. As with many cult teen favorites, 10 Things was axed before it got a chance to really prove what it could do with some runway, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy what did make it to air now.
Some of this is thanks to the narrative details the series changes to make its own, but even more is due to the fact that the show’s lead quintet- Pretty Little Liars’s Lindsay Shaw and Star Trek: Discovery’s Ethan Peck as Bianca and Patrick, Camp Rock’s Meaghan Martin and Succession’s Nicholas Braun as Kat and Cameron, and Franklin & Bash’s Dana Davis as Chastity Church-mostly avoid leaning into the film versions of their characters, giving them a whole new life on the small screen. But despite sharing some obvious DNA in the form of Larry Miller as Kat and Bianca’s over-cautious OB-GYN dad, the single-season ABC Family comedy managed to set itself apart fairly early in its run, earning its own cadre of passionate fans along the way. The original 10 Things I Hate About You is so devastatingly iconic (the Seattle bridge troll! Letters to Cleo! Heath Ledger singing Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons from the empty bleachers!) that re-adapting it for television felt like sacrilege.
So, hats off to Shailene Woodley, Megan Park, Francia Raisa, and all the dudes willing to marry (and unmarry) them over and over again-we’re where we are today because you went all the way (pun, er, intended?) way back then. (Not to mention, egregiously heteronormative-this is a series that features a truly irresponsible number of teen marriages.) That said, the big and audacious Freeform we have today could never have existed if there hadn’t been an ABC Family bold enough to greenlight Pretty Little Liars before it, and there wouldn’t have been an ABC Family willing to greenlight something as wild as Pretty Little Liars if something like The Secret Life hadn’t come before that. This, for better or worse (mostly worse), goes for the series’ principal themes and character arcs, which felt maudlin at the time, but which ring especially sketchy now. When we weren’t looking, Millennial friends, the American Teenager got old.
The Secret Life of the American TeenagerĪdults reading this might not be ready to think of ABC Family’s melodramatic teen pregnancy drama, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, as a modern Teen TV classic, but its first season features honest-to-goodness landline phones.
Mostly, this meant copying over what feels like a full half of Freeform’s historically teen-forward slate, which Hulu (as a vertically integrated member of the linear network’s parent company Disney) has rights to, but there are plenty of surprises-both classic and contemporary-mixed in throughout. For our purposes, we’ve chosen to focus on shows about and for older teens-high school shows, college shows, and a couple animated series especially beloved by teens of all ages.
Middle school-aged teens are interested in different kinds of stories than are high school-aged teens, who are in turn interested in different kinds of stories than are college-aged teens, who in turn become the twentysomething young adults whose newly won freedom high schoolers can’t wait to seize for themselves. A note on our selection process: Teens are not a monolith.