'Off to college soon and I don't know what I'm doing, what should I watch?'
A 17-year-old reckons with "one year left of being a kid" — here are my TV recommendations to cope.
What Should I Watch? is an opportunity for me to provide personalized TV recommendations to newsletter subscribers. You can submit your entry by filling out this form for future newsletters. These will always be free to read, but consider becoming a paying subscriber to support my work.
Dear tvscholar,
I’m a high school student who just got off for summer break and a lot is happening. I have a summer birthday, so I’ll be turning 17 in July, and I’m terrified of what that’ll mean. I know, realistically, 17 is a little young to feel insecure about your age, but it’s scary to know that I’ll only have one year left of being a kid. I’m going off to college soon and I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, both with what I want to study and just life in general. My best friend is off to college in a small town that’s impossible to travel to in August and I’m worried about never seeing her again. I just want to know that all this confusion is normal. I think I need to watch some dark comedy/dramedy/satire to cope…high school is so weird.
-Wannabe Cameron Frye
Dear Wannabe Cameron Frye,
You’ve had me looking through my yearbook and listening to my high school era playlist. It’s been twelve years since I was seventeen, but gosh, some memories of those years are so vivid — existentialism about getting older included. But I’ve recently realized that knowing exactly what you need to be doing in this life is somewhat of a fallacy. Most people that I know are entering their thirties, and frankly, I don’t know anyone who’s got it all figured out in some fantasy adulthood kind of way. Everyone is constantly questioning their lives, me included, wondering what works, where things are headed headed, who am I today and who do I really want to be? Learning and unlearning all the damn time.
When I was 17 years old, I told my parents I wanted to study fashion journalism. I was obsessed with collecting W magazine in piles in my room and ripping out editorial campaigns fronted by Lara Stone for my bedroom wall and I pulled unnecessary all-nighters binging Sex and the City. I had recently broken up with my first and last girlfriend (gay confirmed). I was sneaking off to smoke weed with a friend in the neighbourhood and complaining about life. My whole life was up-ended in my eleventh year of high school in Seattle and I started anew back in Canada for my senior year, only to pick up and leave once again for college. My friendships were constantly in flux.
My undergraduate degree ended up being in art history and I wrote furiously for the campus newspaper. I also wrote articles for like $40 for Karley Sciortino’s blog, Slutever. It took me until my master’s degree to realize that my interest in fashion came from a juvenile, 17-year-old brain, that I wasn’t as committed to an art historical analysis of every season’s runways as I had thought. When I first encountered the study of television, things clicked in a major way: this whole time, television had been the only constant. My life felt like it was rebooting itself every few years: new cities, new friendships, new relationships, but it took until nearly my mid-twenties to feel like I was finally studying something that mattered to me. And still, things changed and continue to change, all the damn time.
A fallacy of adulthood is assuming life will be like a sitcom. That everything will remain static, and even if the most outlandish thing occurs, the next episode will reset to predetermined dynamics. Your college years will break this wide open, expose you to ways of thinking and living that you hadn’t even considered. Some adults finish college and immediately seek a predetermined path: marriage, kids, a house in the suburbs. Others, like me, continue to experiment, wondering what could still be outside of the nuclear family.
Obviously, there is a ton of television in the locker-slamming, bell-ringing teen content genre. I don’t think recommending the Netflix teen show du jour would be particularly helpful for you, but maybe try one of the recent shows about adults looking back on their high school years. Obviously, Yellowjackets is an extreme example, but try Class of ‘07 for something more on the comedic side. The Australian series on Prime Video starts out at a ten-year high school reunion at an all-girls Catholic school when apocalyptic flooding keeps them stuck together on campus for the near future. The girls quickly devolve into old high school dynamics, and there’s lots of rumination on the expectations of adulthood versus their realities now and how those tender high school years can be impactful into adulthood.
There’s also Back to Life, a British dark dramedy from BBC One that’s available via Showtime about a woman who is released from prison after an 18-year sentence for a crime she committed in high school. She returns home excited to crimp her hair and play with her tamagotchi, and she doesn’t understand why everyone is obsessed with their phones. Sharp Objects is on this note too, about a journalist who returns to her hometown to write about a murder that triggers her memory of her own high school era trauma. These shows embody what I think I’ve been going through myself, lately—an unpacking of how those years have had an impact on the way I move through the world today, for better or worse. If that's too damn serious for now, Hulu’s Pen15 is a quick, lighter binge, written and created by two millennials who play their middle school selves in one of the most memorable comedies of the last few years.
It may be helpful to look ahead, too. There is a ton of twenty-something existential television, and even more lessons to be gleaned from their mistakes. It might be time for you to watch Girls, the HBO series many are re-watching or discovering for the first time, a (dare I say) satirical series of that specific millennial disposition. Or try Search Party, a satire of the satire, what I once called the anti-Girls when it first aired. Watch Hacks for lessons on self-destruction. Watch High Fidelity to get mad with me about how it got cancelled after one season, but also for how it depicted a group of twenty-somethings figuring out the tender relationship space. Watch Good Trouble, which gives you a sampling of ten different shows at once, depending on where each of the communal-living characters are at in a given season, with an activist bend to it. Hell, watch Gilmore Girls, just to get to the point where Rory goes to college and goes off the rails.
To be honest, I spent the majority of my teen years waiting to be an adult. I yearned for high school to end, I deleted my Myspace hoping all traces of those years would be gone. I always gravitated toward those older than me, and I was constantly dreaming of my idealized future. Part of that is just the queer millennial experience, high school not being the safest place for queer expression in the 2000s-2010s.
Eventually, that future arrived, and yes, there is the occasional glorious night out and deep friendships, but there’s also rent to pay, a retirement plan to think about, taxes to file, and the push-and-pull between stability and passion. Once in a blue moon, I find myself wishing I had enjoyed being 17 for just a little big longer, hugged that friend who meant so much to me at the time and who I don’t speak to anymore, said thank you to that teacher who nurtured my writing, and just inhaled being young and not knowing what was to come instead of obsessing over what my degree will be in. You’ll probably change your mind anyways. I’m trying to do that now, being more present, making up for lost time.
Quick Recs:
“I’m learning to be in a healthy relationship after toxic one. Learning to love my life after my mother’s death, after losing my best friend without ever having the conversation about what happened. You know the feeling when you are sure you’re never going to find someone to love, or be in a relationship, I have those feelings but about friendship. Most of the time I am happy and chill but sometimes I feel like I’m going to fall apart.”
→ Try watching Couple’s Therapy on Showtime to unpack the relationship woes, Tiny Beautiful Things on grieving a mother, and dig your heels into a multi-season show like Grey’s Anatomy, Queen Sugar or Halt and Catch Fire to remember how long life really is, how much there is to discover and how your friendships will always be in flux.
“Currently applying to colleges and writing endless entrance tests. I’m in that weird limbo where I’m stressed 24/7 but I also don’t know when I get out of this space.”
→ My most stressed friends are watching a lot of reality television, but I tend to disconnect by watching something really intense. Try The Haunting of Hill House and get scared out of your mind, or get absorbed into mormon extremism on Under the Banner of Heaven, or check out Exterminate all the Brutes for a fascinating docu-series experience.