An Extra Special Report on the youth Generation: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
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The Rise and Fall of YA TV: How Creators & Development
Execs Are Appealing to Gen Z In The Age of TikTok
By Katie Campione, Lynette Rice
December 6, 2024 7:00am
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.
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?
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“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.”
