What little fun there is in addiction comes from keeping it a secret, which is why I usually don’t tell people that I really, really like an ABC Family show. It’s called The Fosters, it’s produced by noted dramatist Jennifer Lopez and its characters inhabit a beautiful two-story Craftsman home with a great kitchen in some unidentified southern California town. The Fosters – it’s a play on words – are a blended family with two moms and five children. Their family ties are complicated: only four of the kids are fostered, though two are twins, and one is the biological son of one of the mothers from a previous marriage. There is a lot of beautiful clothing and coastal scenery on offer. And also a lot of contrived drama of the kind that feels distinctly adolescent: Monday’s winter premiere involved a sudden suicide attempt.
I could give you a list of reasons why it is totally acceptable for me, a grown adult, to be watching this television show. It was reviewed in the New Yorker, for one. I like to know What the Kids Are Up To, for two. But neither of those can really hide that here I am, in my mid-30s, watching a show about and for teenagers.
And in fact many in my larger circle of acquaintances are, too. I am aware of grown adults devoted to The Vampire Diaries, Reign and Pretty Little Liars. Most of these shows are premiering this week; these friends have their DVRs set and ready. They speculate to each other about theories. And they aren’t outliers, either. In fact, though most of the shows are supposedly aimed at teenagers, they enjoy substantial adult audiences. Check out their ratings and you’ll see healthy numbers in the vital 18–49 demographic. The Fosters, for example, garnered 0.5% of that target audience on Monday, while The Vampire Diaries can draw as much as 1.5%.
Friends I query about these proclivities usually say that they watch the shows as a form of relaxation from otherwise demanding lives. They find something soothing in the shows’ lack of pretension, the way they flout this age of small-screen “ambition” and refuse to be anything other than television shows through which one may zone out at the end of a long day. While many say they try to keep ogling to a bare minimum, they point out that the actors on the shows they watch are rarely teenagers themselves. You know, technically.
But it all raises the question of childish tastes.
That’s a running theme of cultural commentary lately. Last September, the film critic AO Scott wrote a long essay for the New York Times Magazine about the death of adulthood in popular culture. Following on prior criticism of the young-adult book industry – which is substantially supported by the purchasing power of adults enthralled with the likes of JK Rowling and John Green – Scott worried that American culture was, to put it bluntly, immature. Curiously, he began with television, which he portrayed as once having been the province of adults. His evidence for this was three shows: Mad Men, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. The end of these shows, he suggested, was a kind of harbinger of the end of what could still be called maturity in American culture.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I see parallels between the soapy end of Mad Men – the endless angst Don Draper feels about his inability to truly love other people – and what happens on The Fosters. The melodrama imposed by the self-absorbed on their families and friends, as it turns out, doesn’t have an age limit. Plus, there are biographical parallels between the protagonists. Callie is effectively an orphan (it’s complicated) – and so was Don Draper (again, complicated). Sure, their consequent alienation plays out in different ways in each of their lives. But that seems more a function of the fact that Callie is still a teenager and Don is in his 40s than of the writers’ and directors’ skills, most of the time.
In fact, you can easily find other parallels of this kind on television. Should you be looking for sex metaphors filtered through the lens of bloodsucking, on the one hand you have The Vampire Diaries, and on the other True Blood. Where Reign suits certain costume-drama needs, Game of Thrones seems to satisfy others. Pretty Little Liars is an extended, cynical murder mystery, and if in focus and aesthetic it bears little resemblance to True Detective, there is something about the addiction to tight, zigzagging plotting that links fans of the two. Adult and “teen” tastes are much closer than you think.
And anyway, there was a time within most of our living memories when it would not have been considered very adult to watch television at all. Thank God we no longer live in it.
