TV viewers love teen dramas.
But do TV viewers love good teen dramas?
One Tree Hill aired 187 episodes.
It did not make our list of TV’s 15 Best Teen Dramas of All Time. Because it’s not very good.
More than half of our list is made up of shows that aired fewer than 20 episodes. Several of the series here are indeed among TV’s most egregious hasty one-and-done cancellations, in some cases revealing a wild lack of foresight from the networks or streamers in question.
Compiling the list taught us some interesting things, other than the fact that the best teen dramas tend to get prematurely pulled.
One is that the teen drama is a fairly recent phenomenon. Beverly Hills, 90210 is not an old show, but it’s the oldest show on our list.
Another is that the teen drama seems to be a largely English-language phenomenon, at least judging by what’s exported to American small screens — though that has started to change in the past decade or two. We didn’t include Elite or All of Us Are Dead or Skam or the original Israeli Euphoria, though we could have if we’d liked them more.
As we started doing our rankings, we noticed that the pack of great teen comedies is possibly even more robust than the pack of great teen dramas, so those will be ranked in a different list, at a later date. That’s why we didn’t include Undeclared, The Wonder Years, PEN15 or Reservation Dogs here.
When deciding what qualified as a drama, we made choices that may seem arbitrary or inaccurate to some readers. In other words, a few of our favorite teen dramas could easily be considered comedies if you were the Emmys.
Without further ado…
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Glee (Fox, 2009-15)
Image Credit: Adam Rose/Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection To call Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan’s musical dramedy inconsistent would be putting it mildly. Everything about this show, from its storylines to its fickle characters to its half-acidic/half-syrupy tone, seemed to shift with the winds. But what is the experience of being a teen, anyway, if not trying every single thing and feeling every single second of it with every single fiber of your being? When this show hit — as with that premiere-ending rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin’” — it hit like nothing else, combining the potency of pop music with the giddiness of adolescence to downright transcendent effect.
