Teen TV Genre Takes Adolescent Angst to a Darker Place
Two 17-year-olds go from odd couple to runaways to fugitives in ‘The End of the F***ing World’
The next romantic teen comedy with hit potential has a modified F-bomb in its title and two unconventional 17-year-old characters at its heart. He’s a self-diagnosed psychopath looking for his first murder victim. She’s his unwitting target with a destructive agenda of her own.
“The End of the F***ing World,” a TV series that premiered Friday on Netflix, joins a growing number of shows exploring the fringes of adolescent tumult. Among them: “Riverdale” (The CW), which plunged the gang from Archie Comics into a noir murder mystery; “Runaways” (Hulu), in which a group of high schoolers balance everyday angst with a friend’s death and burgeoning superpowers; and “13 Reasons Why” (Netflix), a teen suicide drama that made waves last year in schools and families.
Even “Stranger Things,” Netflix’s sci-fi series set in the 1980s, tapped into the trend by pitting a group of prepubescent children against a horror from another realm.
Maybe it’s due to an evolution of teen storytelling tropes, a reflection of uncertainty and anxiety in the real world, or an effort by producers to match the mind-set of young viewers who have already seen it all on the internet—but the genre is processing harsher stuff than the high-school crushes and crises that typified “Sixteen Candles” and other hormone-steeped classics of past generations.
“There’s more of an appetite to go to darker places,” says Charlie Covell, who wrote the “End of the F***ing World” TV series. She says teens are grappling with many of the same issues they always have—alienation, confusion, familial discord. Now, though, there’s an “open forum” for exploring them thanks to an explosion of content and a blurring of lines among genres.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-tv-genre-takes-adolescent-angst-to-a-darker-place-1515240001
My comments: America gets Darker and Darker, with no end in sight.