Watching Teen TV: An Interview with Stefania Marghitu (Part One)

i’ve spent an astonishing number of hours during the pandemic watching shows set in high school and middle school — Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Atypical, The Baby Sitter’s Club, and so many others. These years were not very fun or comfortable ones in my own life, yet there is something very comforting about the emotional legibility of teen television.

Stefania Marghitu’s newly released Teen TV examines this terrain as a market demographic and genre category with a rich history, one which sheds light on how young people understand their lives across the second half of the 20th century. Each generation seems to discover this genre on its own as producers seek to update recurring themes and conventions with new iconography, new issues that reflect how young people see themselves and their lives. Marghitu combines nuanced analysis of shows, audiences, producers, marketing and programming trends, and shifting media ecologies with interviews with leading producers of teen television series. The resulting book is short but sweet — easy to read and teach but also rich in insight and deeply grounded in historical research.

Marghitu was recently included in a Vice documentary on Teen TV. Check it out!

Marghitu is a recent graduate from the PhD program in critical studies at the USC Cinema School, where I was lucky enough to advise her dissertation — in this case, an exploration of the impact of female writer-producers at different phases of television history. She’s an exceptional television historian embarking on the early phases of her career and it is my pleasure and honor to present her to my readers. Across this three part interview, we dig deep into the premises of her Teen TV book. Enjoy!

Let’s start where your book starts -- “What is Teen TV? Does Teen TV even exist anymore? Do teens even watch television?”

I’m not an essentialist by any means- I mention anecdotes in the introduction that ask these questions while Teen TV was on a new precipice, and the boom continues across television. This line of questioning on its existence and assumed “extinction” reminded me of television and media scholars like Amanda Lotz who took on the cyclical “television is dead” statement. Television has gone through phases that need to be distinguished. In a recent job interview I was asked where I draw the line on what television is, and it’s more about discerning what early broadcast, post-network, cable, streaming, etc is.

Teen TV is both aimed at a demographic (or multiple demographics, such as TV for Teens themselves or Teen TV for fans of the genre). And what I remain fascinated about television and this genre specifically is how we can trace the history just as much as we can apply cultural specificities to different eras, movements, trends, success, failures, and flops. It’s along with the generational cord cutter argument, but it’s also connected to, say, college students traditionally not having televisions. This is what else interested me in the generational aspect of the genre- the idea that teens didn’t want to watch TV in early broadcast because it was for their parents and they were going to drive ins, concerts etc. once they had freedom, or even listening to music or using the telephone instead of TV.. That argument has been made for every generation whether it’s  new music sensation and related venues, shopping, roller rinks, the Internet…

There is presumably no market for Teen TV until there is. That’s commercial art, and the fickle and unreliable nature of the industry. Formulas can only last for so long, what Todd Gitlin calls recombinant culture that makes television go on, and teens are discerning of what they will actually like. The supply and demand nature of the medium is based on certain “universal” aspects of coming of age as well as nuances of each generation.

You describe teens as a “desired, but elusive audience”? Can you explain both sides of that phrase?

Great segue! Teens are fickle. Pre WWII youth culture can be traced to flappers,.I made a joke about how VSCO girls are like this for the pandemic, because the trend was being likened to 1920s flappers. To be a desired audience means you have money to spend in the eyes of commercial television. To be an elusive audience is to be constantly changing demographic that is one of the most difficult to cater to when generational shifts and rebellion against past generations defines the current one. That’s part of teens evolving and gaining independence in US Post World War economies because of the rise in wealth and more expendable income of teens as a new market. The socioeconomic affordances of being a teenager and having that experience, especially an American Teenager, is intrinsically linked to marketing to the new demographic.

I remember taking a music history class as an undergrad and my professor at Indiana University indicating it was the first time in modern history teens tastes were radically different from their parents. Rock N Roll provided this, not just as a music genre, but as a fashion choice, a backdrop to subversion. Alternative Rock, grunge and hip-hop did this for the MTV generation and subsequent programming. The media industries are going to try to appeal to any demographic with money to spend. Again this is an argument of why progressive programming was accepted in the ‘70s- Mary Tyler Moore for second wave feminists with their own jobs and income; The Jeffersons for Black Americans quite literally “moving on up.”

When I was growing up the “tween” category was everywhere. The last year I taught as a graduate student a lot of students said teens shows didn’t speak to them at all, then Euphoria was able to tap in, gaining this fascination from my students more universally than any other series before.  As much as reboots and spin-offs try, they are not a guarantee. And many Teen TV reboots and spin-offs failed, as well as global adaptations. It’s a perfect case study of a genre that cannot be stagnant and must adapt to its demographic.

You describe teen television as a “gender factory,” a phrase which evokes for me Geraldine Bloustein’s phrase “girlmaking” to refer to the way femininity is produced, performed, and enforced in everyday life. So, how would you describe the role that television plays in the construction of teen’s gender identity as compared with socialization through social media or face to face encounters? Does television produce or consume or both gender norms?

I think it’s no surprise those interested in television genre such as soap opera, and all of the amazing early television scholars abroad and in the US discussing the discourse of gender and genre, are also attracted to Teen TV. Just as early teen media for middle class girls was targeted to future housewives, that still had to change. Television can both influence girl making and reflect it. And just as women in soap operas and melodramas, or audiences could queer media texts, interpreted texts beyond a one way understanding - it’s why I love citing Stuart Hall’s early writing on popular media serving as beyond propaganda, whether capitalist or nationalistic or any other intended messages, Teens are coming of age and learning along the way a new understanding of the world around them and their own identity. And teens and youth movements are traditionally associated with change and demanding more each generation.

I have a hard time telling students that writing on the “impact” of a media text is actually quite difficult- and of course it’s because media studies scholars are in direct opposition to the overly simplified “media effects” conclusions. If a generation of teens are more accepting of, and demand, equality for marginalized groups, then there is an initiative to appeal to that if it’s also market driven.

One of my favorite assignments is a media biography, and I have so many students who write about a turn or development towards understating who they are, who they want to be, and what they won’t let themselves be deterred by. Taste and material cultures and branding and lifestyle determines a lot of what give teens these feelings of identity. It’s a push pull between a commercial industry and capitalist system trying to package and promote and those trying to make sense of where they’ll fit into that world.

Aniko Imre gives this brilliant lecture on Neoliberalism in Introduction to TV, and it’s very complex and sprawling, but for some students it clicks in this really amazing way. This is why media that supports traditional expectations like gender norms can be totally rejected, and that’s when it has to change.

 We know surface level representation and tokenism is not the answer, and students who look at Teen TV see how the lens of media industries and other systems and hierarchies of power can provide an understanding of how ideology works. Because it’s their identity and their future at stake. And it’s what’s amazing about connecting to students through what they care about and connect to.

 If the teen in teen tv is a demographic group, a market construct, a genre category, a discursive formation, etc., then might we need a new genre distinction for Preteen TV to refer to shows like Never Have I Ever, The Babysitter’s Club, and Pen15 to distinguish it from teen shows that tend to skew much older and increasingly deal with sexual matters?

Absolutely.  Watching Pen15 was very cathartic for me, seeing a reflection of this awkward, confusing, strange time in your life back at you. Not just the age but the time period. It’s also why Freaks and Geeks is actually quite complex- the geeks are more like the preteens and the freaks are the teens. They’re distinguished not just by social category but also by age. We see this in Pen15 too- different levels of puberty and milestones reached at certain ages, entering these new spaces as not just the youngest and most naive, but most likely to be the lowest rung of middle school, or high school’s, hierarchy.

And we also see immigrants, children of immigrants, teens dealing with grief or loss, alongside understating gender and sexual identity, experiments with drugs and alcohol, mental health issues. And I think what makes the Preteen shows distinguishable is that parents and their children can watch together. Preteens may not quite be ready for the intense nature of the new HBO Max series, but also they’re not interested in the sexual milestones. It’s this stage where you want to be released from being a child- think about the shifts in development as well as clothes, bedroom decor.

All of these shows also present new independence but also feeling confined by parents, and that desire to bond with friends. Pen15 is about two best friends dealing with things together but also moments of tension and rupture, it taps into that same age range that Broad City did for post-college twenty somethings. Babysitters Club puts both likely and unlikely friends together, almost on the same fundamentals as a workplace sitcom, because they’re these future entrepreneurs essentially. 

Never Have I Ever is another one that so many Indian Americans and children of immigrants have identified with. Mindy Kaling has this background in both workplace sitcoms with The Office and rom-com hybrids with The Mindy Project and Love Actually. So Never Have I Ever captures something even more untapped than her previous projects.

And something like the thoughtful reconfiguring of the characters, cultural specificity and subsequent casting in the new Babysitters Club can appeal both to the nostalgia of past fans and new audiences of the preteen demographic. And it’s a balance between friendships, school, family, storylines also including parents and other family members like Claudia’s grandmother.

My students once had an argument about an indigenous coming of age series and its cancellation. One student very quickly looked up the reviews and said the show shouldn’t just keep going because of the “optics.” The student who originally mentioned it said she quite enjoyed it, although it was not perfect. And many first seasons, or first few seasons aren’t. It’s about which series are granted that time to develop, it became a conversation about privilege and what stories get to be told.

Stefania Marghitu holds her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor from The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Her book, Teen Television (Routledge Genre Guidebook series), was released in May 2021. You can also find her work published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Spectator, as well as the edited collections White Supremacy and the American Media (Routledge, forthcoming, 2021) and ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). 

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches courses on digital media, film, gender, race, and adaptation. She has previously taught introductory and upper level courses on film, television, and digital media history, aesthetics, industry, and theory at Pitzer College, Chapman University, California State University Northridge, and Columbia College Hollywood.