Must see TV
A seminal era of teen television gets shallow treatment
Some of TV’s most trenchant drama, comedy, and social analysis of the last 30 years has come courtesy of teen shows, or at least shows that adults hungrily consume which happen to be about teens. Think “My SoCalled Life,” which gave high school kids vast interior lives. Or “The O.C.,” which snuck issues of class and affluenza into a showcase for pretty youngsters in an even prettier setting. Or “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the fish-out-of-water comedy that got deceptively serious about the complexities of race. The highlights of this generation of teen TV weren’t vacuous teenybopper escapism, though they were, in different ways, quite entertaining. They were thoughtful bursts of storytelling that shifted the landscape of a medium — sometimes too thoughtful for their own good, judging by how quickly many of them were yanked off the air by executives who didn’t know how to sell them.
Thea Glassman proves a sharp observer of the era in “Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek: How Seven Teen Shows Transformed Television.” She also proves a gush-prone fan, and these two qualities — critical observation and gee-whiz fervor — don’t always get along. For every wellreported insight about the guerrilla-style filmmaking that distinguished “Friday Night Lights,” the inspired Texas high school football drama that aired from 2006 to 2011, there’s a sentiment better suited to a fan message board: “My hot take is that Landry was actually quite cool.” Glassman clearly loves the seven series fea-
tured here: “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “My So-Called Life,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “The O.C.,” “Friday Night Lights,” and “Glee.” The tone of the book often veers into breathless excitement, which is fine when it doesn’t stand in for smart analysis.
And so we get observations like this, on “Glee” writer Ross Maxwell: “He still remembers the awe he felt stepping through the grand iron gates of Paramount Studios for the first time. It was like he had entered some sort of dream factory.” There’s a lot of this in “Freaks, Gleeks,” a lot of cliché doing a lot of heavy lifting. This is frustrating largely because Glassman can also be an astute observer of her subject. She is particularly good, for example, on how NBC had no idea what to do with “Freaks and Geeks,” the wonderfully awkward dark sunburst of a series that brought the likes of Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Linda Cardellini to a mass audience (or to an audience, anyway). She is well attuned to the strangeness of the fact that “Fresh Prince” was created by a white husband-and-wife writing team, Andy and Susan Borowitz. (Then again, it was 1990, not 2023.) She generally knows her stuff.
What’s missing is intertextual analysis, or any kind of sustained, unifying argument that might have made the book more than a collection of features on some memorable series. There’s a rote quality to “Freaks, Gleeks,” a formula that stands in contrast to shows that succeeded largely by disposing of formulas. You never really get the sensation of these series talking to each other. Glassman marches through each show dutifully, touching on how they came together, hitting highlights, talking to casting directors and writers and supporting players. She didn’t speak with many boldfaced names, but that’s not really the problem. The book is more of a blow-by-blow tick-tock assemblage than a cohesive overview with a point of view other than that these were really cool shows. That might be enough for diehard fans of the series included, but “Freaks, Gleeks” could have been so much more, something reflecting the creativity of the works described between its covers.
It is, however, a great occasion to revisit some of those works. To soak in the miracle that was the teen Claire Danes in “My SoCalled Life,” all 19 episodes of it. To revisit the genuine pathos of the “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” episode of “Fresh Prince.” To realize once again that “The O.C.” was much more than a “Beverly Hills 90210” knock-off. “Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek” is enough to send you scurrying to your favorite streaming service to put together your own thoughts on the teen TV boom. Most of these shows hold up and hold a mirror to a period of recent cultural history worthy of study.