TEEN SHOWS
es, but creator Nosipho Dumisa-Ngoasheng said that even in a majorityBlack country, her show is breaking new ground.
“We haven’t seen ourselves depicted this way on screen,” she said. And that “we” reaches across the ocean.
When it debuted in 2020, “Blood and Water” was the first South African show to break into Netflix’s Top 10 list in the United States. The series, a hybrid mystery and elite private high school drama set in Cape Town, is “Veronica Mars” meets “Gossip Girl” meets “The O.C.,” but with much better beaches and a mostly Black cast.
Its popularity in the United States was a shock to Dumisa-Ngoasheng at first but more understandable once you take into account the dearth of shows like it.
Young Black audiences are “looking to see themselves,” said Valerie Adams-Bass, a developmental psychologist who teaches a course about adolescents and the media at the University of Virginia. “It’s super-important to see people your age who look like you. To see how they’re managing these encounters, how they navigate the racial tensions, the class tensions that have to do with your identity.”
Since the fanatical success of “Beverly Hills, 90210” in 1990, teen television shows have largely been concerned with one particular point of view – of the White and wealthy.
At the genre’s mid-2000s peak, the list of network-anchoring series stretched far. There was “Dawson’s Creek,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “One Tree Hill,” “The O.C.,” “Friday Night
Lights,” “Veronica Mars” and “Gossip Girl,” just to name a few. Each glossy reimagining of high school assembled a cast of soonto-be Hollywood stars and starlets, their brooding, squinty-eyed faces staring at viewers from promotional posters. The characters were almost always on the verge of some homecoming-induced crisis – and the cast was almost always entirely White.
It’s still a pervasive trope. Last year, actress Vanessa Morgan, a series regular on the wildly popular CW teen soap “Riverdale,” publicly expressed her frustration at playing a sidelined Black character on the mostly White teen drama. “Tired of us also being used as sidekick non-dimensional characters to our white leads. Or only used in the ads for diversity but not actually in the show,” she tweeted.
The show’s creator apologized and promised to do better. “She’s right,” executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa responded in an Instagram post. “We’re sorry and we make the same promise to you that we did to her. We will do better to honor her and the character she plays. As well as all of our actors and characters of color. Change is happening and will continue to happen.”
The marked change so far is thanks in part to reboots, colorblind casting and streaming. The teen drama script we’ve grown accustomed to might finally be flipping.
“Blood and Water” and “Gossip Girl” 2.0 join the growing list of more inclusive teen TV with shows such as “Never Have I Ever,” “Elite,” “On My Block” and “13 Reasons Why” also reining in viewers.
The new “Gossip Girl,” where half sisters Zoya and Julien collide at the same Upper East Side private school that served as the glitzy backdrop for the original CW series, feels refreshing. The main characters are young women of color, and the cast as a whole is much more diverse than the original show based faithfully on the books by Cecily von Ziegesar.
The original’s overarching theme was “rich people have problems,
too.” But a lot has happened since the show bowed in 2012. The new version, which premiered on HBO Max in July and will air the second half of its debut season in November, is intentional about the questions it asks: What does it look like to be rich and privileged in this country right now, but not be White or straight? What is your place in the world?
Safran said the writers’ room is hyper-aware of the impact the characters
and the choices they make have on the audience, “probably to the detriment in some people’s eyes to the show.”
“We made a decision early on that Zoya would not be co-opted by these people. She has the strength of her convictions, she has that fortitude,” he said. “That’s our way of saying like, ‘Hey, if you’re watching this, you don’t actually have to lose yourself. Not fitting in is a strength in and of itself that you should be proud of.’ There is like a hidden message in there.”
Those Easter eggs are crucial, and they don’t go unnoticed, according to psychologist Adams-Bass.
TV shows centered on young Black women – even the messy melodramatic schmaltz of a teen soap – are impactful because they act almost like a peer, she said. They can help guide adolescents through their own decision-making, whether it be pursuing a relationship with the bad boy versus the good one or, in Puleng’s case, whether to steal secret files from her boyfriend’s shady dad. Sure, the story lines are
over the top, but they can also be allegorical.
“Puleng had to be imperfect,” said DumisaNgoasheng. “She makes some decisions that are really frustrating if you’re an adult. It’s like ‘Come on, Puleng, why would you do that?’ But if you think about who you were as a young person, you made mistakes all the time.”
“These kids needed to feel like kids,” she added. It’s a role that Black teens, on screen and in real life, don’t often get to play.
The goal then isn’t just to give these characters more screen time (though that’s key), but to give them the space to screw up, sneak out and steal a boyfriend or two, just like their White counterparts. They should actually be a part of the drama and not simply a witness to it.
“We wanted to allow for the reality of mess. Growing up is about mess,” said Safran about how he and his writers approach the show. “It’s just that messiness maybe means something different when you’re not like rich, White and privileged.”