I have no idea how common it is for teens to cope with tragedy. While high school students no doubt regularly fall victim to traffic accidents, drug overdoses, and gun violence, it still seems to me as though most students shouldn’t actually know young people who have died. Not personally anyway.
This all changes on TV, where every tragedy seems connected to whomever happens to star on the show. We never learn of “that girl who was in my science class last year who I never talked to, but now it turns out she was hit by a car.” Instead we bear witness time and again to the gripping tragedy of intimate loss.
As with series 6 of Skins which I previously wrote about here, season 1 of Veronica Mars is framed by grief. The show’s premise and mystery arc, which I’ve also previously discussed, is based on the murder of a girl who was loved by many of the main cast – her brother, her best friend, her boyfriend, her second lover – all of whom must come to terms with the loss.
Season 4 of The O.C. falls into this trend as well, as the remaining cast cope with Marissa’s death, some of them postponing their life plans to grieve. Like Grace, Marissa was not only central to her friends’ lives, but to the audience’s experience of the show. These deaths, as a result, frame the series narrative and character development for a significant time.
But even when occupying a far more limited narrative space, teenage deaths inevitably hit close to home on teen dramas. It’s not just some random senior who shoots himself in the school bathroom at Degrassi High (a traumatizing experience for all students, no matter what); it is Caitlin’s ex-boyfriend.
It’s not just some girl in their grade at Capeside High who drowns off the pier one night, but Jen’s friend Abbey; Jen, who is there at the time to witness the tragedy.
Even when an unknown nobody, a geek with few friends at West Beverly Hills High accidentally shoots himself, we, the audience, knew him and his best friend David, who was also there to witness his death.
What strikes me is that we are never those kids in the crowd who had never heard of Scott until he blew his brains out playing with his father’s gun. We’re not the ones hypocritically mourning a girl we didn’t really like. We’re not the girl in grade 9 who hears a shot, and is evacuated, and has no idea who died, or why he might have killed himself.* But why not? You would think that this is an experience that television narratives could address. How do you act when a school is in mourning, but you didn’t actually know or care about the person who died? Why do we seem to always experience these deaths up close? Is it just because tragedy makes great narrative drama? Is it just because to put our main characters through the emotional wringer is entertaining to watch? Or maybe if we weren’t close to the teens who died, we might not feel the weight of premature death. Is it because our favourite TV series really want us to experience the pain of loss? For whatever reason teen drama keeps it close, exposing viewers to the tragedy – not simply the fact – that sometimes teens don’t make it past high school.
*There is an exception here in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In this series, people die all the time, most of whom we, and the characters, don’t really know. But in this counter-example, it’s not about the tragedy, it’s about the horror, and more importantly the super hero who kicks its ass.
