The Rise And Fall Of YA TV: How Creators & Development Execs Are Appealing To Gen Z In The Age Of TikTok
Is anyone even watching young adult TV anymore?
As the entire television ecosystem has been upended in recent years, dedicated spaces for YA content have all but disappeared. The CW swiftly cancelled nearly all of its scripted series, many of which targeted this audience, over the last few years. Freeform has done the same.
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The streamers have largely taken up the mantle on speaking to young audiences, but still questions remain. With the rise of short-form content thanks to TikTok and YouTube, does this new generation of teens and young adults even care for longform, scripted content? How can streamers compete for Gen Z’s attention in such a fractured landscape?
“I don’t think the demand is dwindling,” Greg Berlanti, who has produced some of the most culturally relevant YA content of the past two decades from Dawson’s Creek to Riverdale, told Deadline. “There will always be a place for great YA. In fact, I think there is a huge opportunity for one of the current platforms to become the place people expect to find the best of it.”
Deadline spoke with several creators and development executives who agreed with Berlanti that, while the landscape looks different than it used to, there’s still a bustling marketplace for young adult television.
The Rise and Fall of YA TV
During its heyday, the CW (and its predecessors, the WB and UPN) was the unequivocal home for young adult television that included faves like One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and more. The network spent more than 20 years servicing the audience before a regime change in 2022 led to a shift away from that programming toward unscripted and sports content that appeals to a larger (see: older) viewership.
With the end of Superman & Lois earlier this month, just one YA scripted series remains on the network: All American. But what may have seemed like the death knell on young folks TV was really just another round in a never-ending pattern, argues Julie Plec.
“The story remains the same. For a cycle, everyone swears they’re not buying YA. Everyone. Then one show hits big, and suddenly folks are hungry for it,” The Vampire Diaries creator told Deadline, citing 13 Reasons Why, The Summer I Turned Pretty, and Outer Banks as a few recent examples of YA hits that rejuvenated the marketplace.
It’s a cycle that is all too familiar to creators like Plec, who have been championing the genre for decades.
“Then a couple don’t work, and the market seals up tight again,” she continued. “Never give up on your great YA idea, but definitely expect that you’ll have to survive the cyclical aspect of the buyers’ appetite for the genre.”
It’s not just the CW, either. The landscape for young adult TV became much more fragmented over the years, as is also evidenced by the rise and fall of Freeform (formerly known as ABC Family), which appealed to that audience with hits like Pretty Little Liars, The Fosters, and Good Trouble.
“I think what [those shows] really taught me was how broad young adult content is [and] the breadth of the age range of viewers that just always connects to these deep relationship stories,” Disney exec Simran Sethi, who previously led scripted development at Freeform from 2015-2017 and had a hand in some of the network’s YA hits, including grown-ish and The Bold Type.
Now, leading scripted development and content strategy for Hulu Originals, ABC Entertainment and Freeform, Sethi says that she hasn’t given up servicing that audience, even if that type of content has lost its dedicated homes. Sethi points to Hulu’s Tell Me Lies as an example of a recent streaming series that has succeeded in attracting a young audience.
That’s thanks in part to TikTok, where the first season went viral, helping it reach those younger viewers. This has been the case with many recent young adult series, like The Summer I Turned Pretty and Heartstopper, whose resonance on social platforms has translated to impressive streaming audiences.
TV in the Age of TikTok
Gen Z, those born between the 1990s and early 2010s, is the first generation to be raised in an age dominated by rapidly advancing technology. Most of them have never known a world without social media or smart phones.
With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that YouTube remains, by far, the most-watched streaming platform in the world. According to Nielsen’s November report, YouTube comprised 10.6% of all streaming viewing, with Netflix coming in second place at 7.5%. There is no other competitor that even comes close.
Also take into consideration the dominance of TikTok, which has more than 1B monthly active users, over half of whom are under 30.
This begs the questions: Have social media platforms eclipsed traditional TV? Do young people even want to watch longform, scripted content anymore?
Fortunately, Gen Z has not entirely abandoned traditional TV, even if they are more fickle and harder to attract than teens previously were. This is evidenced in part by the consistency with which young people watch library titles on streaming, like Grey’s Anatomy and Gilmore Girls, both of which are constantly on Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings. At the start of November, Gossip Girl also soared back onto the Nielsen charts after returning to Netflix, with 10% of viewers aged 12-17 and 37% in the 18-34 range.
“This audience is willing to watch dozens and dozens of episodes of library titles. I don’t think they’ve abandoned the form,” Amazon Studios Head of TV Vernon Sanders said. “I do think as media companies, we have to be really thoughtful and fresh in our approach to communicate with them.”
Sanders, like Sethi, stresses the importance of viewing social media platforms as a tool to help build an audience, rather than a direct competitor.
In some cases, brands have opted to put entire episodes on YouTube and TikTok in hopes of catching young peoples’ attention and drawing them to a specific service, as Disney recently did with the premiere of Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
In the case of Prime Video, Sanders points to Jury Duty as a series that drew a massive audience and, because of traction on Instagram and TikTok, “the young people led the way there.”
Not only can social media serve as an avenue to introduce young audiences to content, it can also be a way to build a lasting community that returns season-over-season. Prime Video’s greatest example of this phenomenon is undoubtedly The Summer I Turned Pretty, which thanks to author Jenny Han already had a dedicated social presence that only grew with the release of the show.
Sethi notes that, while social media can help gain the attention of Gen Z, it only works if development executives can find “stories that speak to [young people] directly.”
“It’s about how we capture them, be patient with them, finding these shows and really, really just constantly presenting them with stories that are avatars for their own lives and what they’re going through,” she said.
That sounds simple enough, but as viewing habits for younger generations have changed, so, too, have their tastes.
Speaking to a New Generation of Teens
In October, a UCLA study found that teens these days prefer more depictions of friendship and platonic relationships in film and TV, rather than focusing so heavily on sex or romance. Of the 1,500 young people surveyed across the U.S., more than 63% are more interested in this “nomance”-related content.
Overwhelmingly, every purveyor of YA content who Deadline spoke to agreed that, while they certainly don’t ignore these studies, their goal isn’t to cater to these ever-evolving preferences, opting instead to aim for content that can transcend the current generation of teens. In their eyes, young adult stories are for everyone.
“It’s hard to balance that piece of demographic information against the hungry YA audience that is not Gen Z,” Plec explained. “That’s where a lot of buyers/developers get confused, I think. Because YA content is not exclusively adored by YA-aged audiences. If you only make a show for one age of the audience, you’re closing doors to an extraordinary amount of fans of the genre.”
This is the approach that Justin Noble and Mindy Kaling have taken with their Max original, The Sex Lives of College Girls. Season 3 debuted in November, thrusting the main characters into their sophomore year of college and all the messiness that comes with it.
“I think for some reason we’ve conditioned ourselves into thinking that it’s coming-of-age content, and I think that the implication of that is that, by the end…you figure out exactly who you are, and you’re done. I think that’s so not true,” he said.
While the characters he’s writing are just coming into adulthood, Noble doesn’t care much whether the viewer came of age last month, last year, or last decade.
“I’ve learned new things about myself this week, probably this morning. I think it’s interesting to examine that content that we aspire to see where people are learning more about themselves …and that doesn’t need to stop because you’re out of high school, or you’re out of college, or you’re out of your young adult years, or whatever,” he added. “We can always be figuring out who the happiest, best versions of ourselves are. It’s inspirational TV at the end of the day to see characters figuring it out.”
In fact, trying to appeal solely to one specific generation more often than not hurts rather than helps.
Last month, Max dropped a collegiate romcom called Sweethearts, about a pair of freshmen (played by Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga) who vow to drop-kick their high school sweeties over Thanksgiving break. Director Jordan Weiss, who co-wrote the made-for-Max movie with Dan Brier, acknowledges that it’s harder these days to reach a younger audience, but she’s not ready to abandon the genre just yet.
She won’t, however, be bending over backwards to appeal to the TikTok generation by incorporating their unique lexicon into the dialogue.
“Trends change so frequently that it was a big priority of ours to give the movie a timeless sort of feel, and we were pretty intentional to avoid the use of a lot of modern social media slang,” she said. “We really didn’t want to put any of that on screen because you never know what is going to date a project, and I love being able to rewatch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. One of our goals with this is to make it something that teens will find relatable, but that also is going to have a bit of that evergreen quality. We hope.”
That’s definitely what creators Phoebe Fisher and Sara Goodman tried to keep in mind when crafting the debut season of Cruel Intentions, Prime Video’s reboot of the classic 1999 movie that starred Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar. “Sometimes when you try and incorporate that language that’s so flash in the pan or popular on the internet, it quickly dates you,” acknowledges Goodman of the series, which also kicked off in November.
The series that stars Sara Catherine Hook, Zac Burgess and Savannah Lee Smith faces a unique challenge — faithful fans of the movie may not want to see anyone mess with their cult fave while Gen Z’ers probably don’t even recognize the Roger Kumble movie, much less have any appreciation how it starred the likes of Ryan Phillippe, Selma Blair, Joshua Jackson and the great Christine Baranski.
Fisher and Goodman see some benefit in that, even though they do try to appease the OG fans by dropping lots of Easter eggs into the premiere that harken back to the movie.
“Teenagers have to come to it on their own, based on its own merits,” admits Goodman. “I think so far they’re very open, at least to the trailer and to what we’ve been seeing … We felt like this is what’s missing from television. There’s an escapist quality to living in a world of great privilege where people behave badly. It’s funny and sexy and boundary pushing and irreverent. We’re not trying to send a message or be precious about anything. We’re just having a good time in this world that we don’t usually get to go into. And I think that’s still relevant in terms of entertainment and in terms of what people want to see.”
Passing the Torch
The best way to keep YA content alive is by continuously looking for fresh voices to bring new perspectives to the genre, the development execs agree, as is exemplified by the Cruel Intentions reboot.
At Prime Video, Sanders says the team often looks to its own young employees to chart help the path forward in this space.
“We’re constantly reminding ourselves not to make assumptions, and one of the things we spend a lot of time doing is actually talking to the young people inside our company and really giving them a big voice on, how are they responding to things out in the world, and how are they responding to our slate of choices?” he said. “Oftentimes, it’s their voices behind something that makes us go, ‘Okay, let’s give a shot to this.’”
The young adult genre also lives and dies by the studios’ effort to find and uplift new writers and actors who can speak directly to the next generation, Berlanti adds. Whether it’s a reboot, an adaptation, or an entirely original idea, there needs to be new voices to tell them.
“In my almost 30 years of doing YA material, the best and the ones that have stood out have all come from a younger voice with something to say about the world and the way they perceive it,” he said. “We are always looking for and supporting those voices — whether in books or tv or film writers, that’s where the next great batch will come from.”
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