There is no question that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the best teen dramas. Or at least, there’s no question to those of us who already know and love the show. It’s one of the most written about, one of the deepest and simultaneously silliest. One of the shows that really gets teens.
It’s always great to read a well-written piece about something you care about. So this week I was really pleased to come across this essay, by Kim O’Conner which returns to Buffy once again, and praises the way that the characters of this show defy the coming of age trope. As O’Conner puts it “Unlike most teen dramas, Buffy wasn’t a narrative about finding an identity; it was always about having a lot of them.”
It’s an awesome post, and a really interesting idea about how teen TV narratives tend to frame coming of age as that time when teens realize their identity and become that person… as if that it and once you’ve gone through the trauma of high school you’ll emerge a whole, complete person with no need to change or grow for the rest of your adult life. That stage is done.
It’s completely true that this is an overwhelming trend in teen TV, (I should know, I wrote a thesis all about identifying trends of representation in the genre). Coming of age is an incredibly dominant discourse in the cultural understanding of youth, which can be extremely problematic.
And Buffy indeed moves beyond a lot of this. But I do wish that O’Conner’s article took a more gracious approach to the rest of the teen TV landscape. I’m totally on board with contrasting the success of Buffy with the stereotypical identity resolution of contemporaneous Dawson’s Creek, as a for instance, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only show that succeeds in creating complex characters who also defy the notion that teens simply discover their identity before graduating to adulthood.
For instance, another show that ran concurrently with Buffy did a similar thing but in the completely realistic (versus fantasy-genre) context of high school was Freaks and Geeks. While this short-lived series lacks the type of resolution that it may have achieved had it lasted six years, in its single season it manoeuvres questions of identity spectacularly. Throughout the series, characters struggle against the limitations imposed by the hierarchical structures of high school identities, as they attempt to divest themselves of the labels others use to define them (such as those that give the show its title.)
The main thrust of the narrative of Freaks and Geeks comes from Lindsay Weir’s attempt to turn her back on her former “smart girl” reputation, as she searches for meaning in her life. Simultaneously, her brother Sam tries to figure out why everyone calls him a geek (and how to get them to stop). By the end of the series, characters do not discover their “true” identities, but they do begin to stretch beyond their comfort zones. A stoner learns to disco, a tough guy plays dungeons and dragons, an academic follows the Grateful Dead on tour. They try new things, stretch their wings beyond the tropes of their assigned characterization in search of something that feels right.
Defying the coming of age trope does not mean that the characters of Freaks and Geeks, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer don’t try and figure out all those tricky identity questions. It’s just that they don’t settle on anything definite. There are no easy answers, and nothing’s final. Everybody, teens included, is on a quest to figure out life.
