Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson's Creek
How Seven Teen Shows Transformed Television
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The untold stories of seven revolutionary teen shows (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, My So-Called Life, Dawson’s Creek, Freaks and Geeks, The O.C., Friday Night Lights, and Glee) that shaped the course of modern television and our pop cultural landscape forever.
The modern television landscape is defined by influential and ambitious shows for and about teenagers. Groundbreaking series like Euphoria, Sex Education, and Pen15 dominate awards season and lead the way when it comes to progressive, diverse, and creative storytelling. So how did we get here from Beverly Hills, 90210?
In Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek, entertainment journalist Thea Glassman takes readers behind the scenes of seven of the most culturally significant series of the last three decades, drawing on dozens of new interviews with showrunners, cast, crewmembers, and more. These shows not only launched the careers of such superstars as Will Smith, Michael B. Jordan, Claire Danes, and Seth Rogen, but they also took young people seriously, proving that teen TV could be smart, revolutionary, and “important”—and stay firmly entrenched in pop culture long after it finished airing. And while many critics insist that prestige dramas like The Sopranos and Mad Men paved the way for television, some of the most groundbreaking work was actually happening inside the fictional hallways of high schools across America in teen shows whose impact remains visible on our screens today.
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Glassman, entertainment editor at the website SheKnows, debuts with a fun, nostalgic look at how classic teen TV shows have influenced modern television. Teen shows of the past few decades were often culturally groundbreaking, Glassman writes, such as in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air's depiction of a Black family with "a totally different level" of wealth and positive perspective on hip-hop. My So-Called Life had the first teenager to come out on television, and Dawson's Creek protested California's Prop 22 with an "anti-prom" episode that featured the first kiss between two men on network television, earning the program two GLADD awards. Other shows expanded the structural and tonal possibilities for network teen television, notable examples being Freaks and Geeks' "independent feature film" style and Friday Night Lights' sometimes ad-libbed, sometimes overlapping dialogue, which Glassman contends helped leverage the show into a "leading contender in prestige TV." While some chapters don't delve as deep as others (the discussion of Glee, for instance, is monopolized by the show's numerous scandals and tragedies), Glassman offers enough tantalizing, behind-the-scenes scoop to keep readers hooked, peeling back the curtain on writers' processes, casting decisions, and on-set gossip. This look at teen TV classics will delight anyone who loves to "did you know" their friends while rewatching a favorite.