I came across Vulture’s Teen TV bracket by chance last week, stumbling onto a link and spotting those 4 words I could not possibly avoiding clicking at the top of my screen: High School TV Showdown.
Over the past 3 weeks, 16 different teen shows from the past 30 years squared off until this past Friday Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine, named the ultimate winner of the showdown – the “best” teen show of the past 30 years.
It’s a ridiculously subjective contest and feels wrong in so many ways, (one critic likened it to being forced to choose a favourite child,) to pit amazing shows against one another. But I for one was very curious to see where it would go. As a virtual teen TV expert, people ask me what the best / my favourite show is all the time, and I always struggle to answer, torn between the funniest, the most identifiable, the cleverest, and the most re-watchable. (That would be Freaks and Geeks, My So-Called Life, Veronica Mars, and Gilmore Girls, respectively.) But of course as soon as I start choosing top shows the list starts to grow – how can you leave off Buffy? And what about all the amazing British shows?
So all told, reading through Vulture’s match ups was an intoxicating mix of fear that my precious favourites would get cut, and excitement to see someone else take on the challenge that I would hate (love) to have to do myself.
So here’s what happened:
Round one went largely as predicted, quality dramas beat out comedies, with the only mild surprise coming from Beverly Hills 90210 which made it through to round two over The O.C., which is infinitely more fun to watch, but admittedly less influential and iconic.
Round two proved to be the toughest, as the top 8 shows vied for their spots in the semi-finals. This is the round that saw the end of Gilmore Girls, the end of Veronica Mars! But how could they not get cut when facing the other half of my own personal top 4? My So-Called Life beat Veronica Mars on sheer earnestness. Everyone may wish they had Veronica’s wit and skill, but everyone feels, at some point in life, that the are Angela. The same pattern saw Freaks and Geeks take out Gilmore Girls, its awkward honesty proving more authentic than GG‘s rosy small town quirk and idealized mother-daughter relationship. They were difficult cuts, but they were fair.
On the other side of the bracket, Buffy and Friday Night Lights advanced to face off on similar grounds. Both shows were far more grounded that their opposition (Daria and 90210), taking on high school from a place of sympathy, respect, and deep feeling. Because that’s what it came down to, most of the time: Who did high school better? And when we say “did high school,” what we mean is, who made you feel that perfect mix of dread, awkwardness, self-consciousness, and desire to escape, that concoction that seems to make up the universal high school experience that all teen TV strives for?
Throughout the bracket, right up until the final showdown, whichever show sparked something more earnest and heartfelt about the teen experience seemed to triumph. Recognizing this pattern as I read each day’s contest, I made my prediction early and assumed that without question, My So-Called Life would take the ultimate title. But I was wrong.
That’s not how it turned out, even though no one could really argue that Friday Night Lights is more earnest than MSCL. What happened to my analysis of the situation? The fact is that for the finals something changed. For much of the competition all the critics who judged previous rounds seemed to agree on a shared assumption, that the teen merit was what needed to be judged. Seasons that extended beyond the high school years tended to be ignored (at least so they would claim) and what really came under the microscope was how well that teen-ness came across.
But that all went out the window when FNL was judged a “greater” show overall than MSCL (which was admitted to probably be the “best” teen show). Best vs. Greatest. And Friday Night Lights is once again State Champion.
So why did it win? For exactly the reasons that it probably wouldn’t have, given a different judge (or as Seitz writes, on a different day) because its scope beyond high school was powerful. It delved into the whole ecosystem of a town, it’s fantastic adult characters were the soul of the show, and it grew up well. My So-Called Life was a perfect microcosm of adolescent angst, and given the expected frame of reference, the expected rubric, I expected it to win. But I love Friday Night Lights too. It made me care about people I don’t know in the real world, sports I don’t watch, and a whole way of life that is completely foreign to me. MSCL gets me. But FNL introduced me to something new.
In the end, I feel disappointed that my prediction was wrong, but I don’t hold it against the winner. In some ways, I think that Friday Night Lights is a fantastic show to win for people who have seen all the shows on offer. We can look over the list and nod and say, yes, those were all great candidates, but that one is definitely great. But to someone who is unfamiliar with many of these shows, it seems unfair that so many amazing series got cut so early, and therefore to the untrained eye might be perceived as lesser than. It’s just not fair to have to choose. If you’re looking for a recommendation? Watch them all.
