{"id":56779,"date":"2025-09-11T07:22:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T07:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/56779\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T07:22:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T07:22:10","slug":"what-kind-of-teenager-were-you-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/56779\/","title":{"rendered":"What kind of teenager were you? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The premise of Wednesday<\/a>, newly returned to Netflix<\/a>, is that the unsettling gothette invented by Charles Addams, the New Yorker magazine cartoonist, almost a century ago is now a teenager at Loreto on the Green or some other exclusive private school that supposedly caters to supernatural outcasts.<\/p>\n

First things first: these people aren\u2019t real outcasts. To echo the great Chris Fleming, hair dye, vintage dresses and a deadpan delivery do not \u201coutcasts\u201d make. I\u2019m from Kildare. You should see the freaks who inhabited my school. It was like a zoo. Even the \u201ccool kids\u201d looked like misshapen wanted posters compared to these glossy emo tryhards. Outcasts my hoop.<\/p>\n

Nerds and freaks have long been in the ascendant in the world of teen dramas. Now they have a whole school to themselves. They roam the halls distributing dead arms to terrified jocks. It\u2019s high time that someone made a film called Dead Athletes Society, about a bunch of delicate sportsers inspired to impassioned grunting by a monosyllabic ape.<\/p>\n

Anyway, today I\u2019m going to do a deep dive on the teen-drama genre and how it has changed over the years.<\/p>\n

Hamlet<\/p>\n

Shakespeare invented the teen drama. Romeo and Juliet, which was turned into a Day-Glo Baz Luhrmann film, is essentially how everyone sees their first relationship. The Taming of the Shrew became the excellent teen drama 10 Things I Hate About You.<\/p>\n

But the best of all is Hamlet, in which the ghost of Hamlet\u2019s father basically says \u201cAvenge me\u201d and the teenage Hamlet responds like my nephew does when he\u2019s told \u201cTidy your room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not the boss of me!\u201d Hamlet yells in ye olden-day English and then spends the play in a sulk. He puts off the task at hand for ages, ignores a manic pixie dream girl (Ophelia) who fancies him and forces his family to watch a play he wrote (very relatable) before murdering a bunch of people more or less accidentally because of his shoddy execution of the chore his apparitional parent set him.<\/p>\n

Hamlet is essentially Cameron from Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off mixed with Kevin the Teenager and the Unabomber.<\/p>\n

Muppet Babies<\/p>\n

Everyone under 30 looks the same to me, especially when muppets. Are these \u201cmuppets\u201d in a high school or a creche? Sure it\u2019s the same thing when it comes to the cosseted members of Gen Z, says you.<\/p>\n

John Hughes movies\"FerrisFerris Bueller’s Day Off: Alan Ruck, Mia Sara and Matthew Broderick in John Hughes’ 1986 film <\/p>\n

Teenagers were invented in the 1950s by advertising boffins, but nobody thought to catalogue and taxonomise them until John Hughes began his important work in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Through a sequence of films including Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, Hughes, wearing a white coat and holding a clipboard, realised that teenagers came in five distinct forms: sleepy, grumpy, bashful, dopey … Wait, that\u2019s the seven dwarfs. I mean the jock, the nerd, the rebel, the princess and the freak. <\/p>\n

This formed the basis of the teen drama for decades to follow, a classical template from which few have wavered.<\/p>\n

Scooby-Doo<\/p>\n

What if we put all of those types in a van with a talking dog and got them to solve crime? Good question, professor! And so Scooby-Doo was born. (Yes, I know that Scooby-Doo precedes those John Hughes films, but pointing that out makes you a nerd, and it\u2019s now my duty to bully you.) <\/p>\n

Beverly Hills 90210\"BeverlyBeverly Hills 90210: the cast of the show in 1991. Photograph: Mikel Roberts\/Sygma via Getty <\/p>\n

In the early 1990s the hierarchy of these teenage types was clear. There were cool kids (the 90210 protagonists Brandon and Brenda and most of their friends), and off to the side were James Dean-esque rebels (Dylan) and nerds (Andrea) who knew their subordinate position. <\/p>\n

Freaks basically didn\u2019t really exist (except in one episode where The Flaming Lips were the special guests at the Peach Pit). Furthermore, all of them were to be played, much like Hamlet, by people with mortgages and children and receding hairlines. <\/p>\n

This had a huge influence on other teen dramas, such as Last of the Summer Wine. (I refer those of you quibbling with this chronology to the bit in parentheses in the previous section.)<\/p>\n

Buffy the Vampire Slayer\"BuffyBuffy the Vampire Slayer <\/p>\n

Joss Whedon\u2019s epic vampire-fighting teen drama changed the culture in a bunch of ways. It was the first breakthrough phenomenon to explicitly say, Isn\u2019t being a teenager much like fighting vampires or being in a hunger game or whatever? And now we\u2019re drowning in fantastical teen power fantasies. It also introduced a quippy, self-aware sensibility to the culture that was refreshing at first but became tiresome. (See also: superhero movies.)<\/p>\n

Skins and, later, Euphoria\"SydneySydney Sweeney in Euphoria. Photograph: Sky\/HBO <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a subset of teen dramas in which the conceit is \u201ccheck out the wild and shocking young people with their reckless drugs and sex, which they have totally invented!\u201d <\/p>\n

Skins did a pretty good, moving job of exploring this for Channel 4 in the early part of the century. In the world of Skins the teens existed in a strange, almost fantastical adult-free netherworld. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Euphoria: The show that makes teenage self-destruction look weightless and beautifulOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Euphoria went somewhere similar but somehow turned it into something queasier. \u201cThe main thing is that we make this programme about vulnerable teenagers as sexually explicit as possible,\u201d they said, and we all felt a bit ill.<\/p>\n

My So-Called Life and, later, Freaks and Geeks<\/p>\n

Skins and Euphoria sometimes feigned realism but were, in fact, as heightened as Scooby-Doo. Winnie Holzman\u2019s My So-Called Life and Paul Feig\u2019s Freaks and Geeks presented us with something more realistic and sweet, with vulnerable characters who looked and acted like real, unworldly teens. Sadly, that\u2019s not what those idiots the general public wanted, and they both only lasted a season each.<\/p>\n

The OC, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl\"GossipGossip Girl: Blake Lively and Leighton Meester. Photograph: Warner Bros Entertainment <\/p>\n

By the time of The OC, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl a \u201cteenager\u201d was basically the equivalent of a \u201ccowboy\u201d or a \u201cspaceman\u201d or an \u201corc\u201d, a completely fictional construct with no basis in reality. <\/p>\n

Nobody cared any more whether a \u201cteenager\u201d was played by an actual teen or a horse or somebody in their late 80s, as long as they performed it all between quotation marks and respected the formal boundaries of the genre. The OC, in particular, pointed towards a new teenage hegemony where the heroes were nerds and the cool kids were to be pitied.<\/p>\n

Behind the scenes of our culture Mark Zuckerberg was rubbing his hands and laughing evilly. <\/p>\n

Riverdale\"Riverdale:Riverdale: Cole Sprouse and KJ Apa. Photograph: Diyah Pera\/The CW Network <\/p>\n

In Riverdale the teen drama delightfully eats itself. A postmodern, self-aware romp through the 1950s Archie comics in which the teen stars of another age, from the John Hughes muse Molly Ringwald to the 90210 star Luke Perry, turn up in the parent roles. It\u2019s the revisionist western of the genre.<\/p>\n

Superhero movies: we\u2019re all teenagers now<\/p>\n

A bunch of people with no real adult responsibilities and ridiculous clothes hang out uttering deadpan zingers before dealing with crises that feel like the end of the world. <\/p>\n

Everyone in contemporary culture is basically a teenager now. The Buffyfication of everything had started well before Joss Whedon wrote and directed the first Avengers movie, but now every office bore and television columnist narrates their life with reference to pop-cultural tropes, and grown men all over the city wear shorts. It\u2019s just not on.<\/p>\n

Anyway, as the office jock, I\u2019m off to bully that nerd Fintan O\u2019Toole<\/a>. See you next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The premise of Wednesday, newly returned to Netflix, is that the unsettling gothette invented by Charles Addams, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,2215,19,17,127,12474],"class_list":{"0":"post-56779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-for-you","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-netflix","14":"tag-patrick-freyne"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}