by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

Over the last year, we’ve been looking at the decade of teen television shows that followed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including its immediate contemporaries. Buffy was the start largely because I was the one who decided where to start. It’s my favorite show, it’s the show that got me interested in television and teen shows, specifically, and the impact it had on the genre and the media landscape beyond it is remarkable.

A few shows after the 2005-2006 television series that are of note include the 2006-2007 debut of Friday Night Lights on NBC, the 2009-2010 debut of The Vampire Diaries on The CW, and MTV’s breakout series, Teen Wolf, during the summer between the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 TV seasons. All three shows had huge followings. Friday Night Lights saw itself as a crossover between teen and adult drama, with a fair amount of focus on both parents and the teens. It even had big supporters, including Stephen King, who named it his favorite show of 2010 in Entertainment Weekly. The Vampire Diaries would spawn multiple spin-offs, once of which only ended in 2022. And Teen Wolf… how can I even describe Teen Wolf, a show which warped my brain, and the brains of many Millennials? It gave us Dylan O’Brien, so I can only say lovely things, I’m afraid! (This is plainly not true, please let me rant about Teen Wolf!)

But three shows after the Buffy era encapsulate where we were as a culture and their endings are significant to how things were looking in the television landscape at the time, something of great interest to me. Now, these three shows take us from the fabulous Upper East Side in New York City, to the musical plains of Ohio, and then to a fictional comic book town from the 1940s—all of which are completely wild rides.

In September of 2006, two institutional networks, ones that we’ve been looking at shows from all year, merged together. The WB and UPN ceased to exist within two days of each other. But it was a long time coming. The CW, the network that came out of the merger, launched the day after The WB officially shut off. The new network absorbed all the shows that had been renewed, including previously covered shows like Gilmore Girls, 7th Heaven, Smallville, and Veronica Mars. But the following year, it took a big swing with a new show from Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the creators of The O.C. Their new show was an adaptation of Cecily von Ziegesar’s series, Gossip Girl. It was about a group of Upper East Side teenagers with more hormones than are feasibly useful, more drama than a theater department, and more money than they could ever spend in their lives. It follows the messy exploits of a select few, introducing us to a bunch of young performers who are still bopping around today, including: Blake Lively, Penn Badgley, Chase Crawford, Taylor Momsen, and (queen of my heart) Leighton Meester.

It should be noted that Gossip Girl was fully branded as being completely salacious. They used the marketing from parents being upset about how sexual and provocative the show was to then market the show. Deeply iconic, honestly. And while, with a notable exception of an episode in season two, the series never popped harder than it did in the pilot’s 3.5 million viewers (myself among them), Gossip Girl was consistently one of The CW’s highest performing shows. But as interest faded, superheroes moved in, and the answer to “who is Gossip Girl” seemed less and less interesting, the series ended with a dull thud. In its aftermath, the series became a reminder to many people about how often mysteries, especially within teen shows, don’t seem to have satisfying answers when they last for as long as the series did—121 episodes over six seasons. The reboot of the series, which aired for two seasons on HBO Max (before it became just Max), cut out the mystery of who Gossip Girl was, by having the audience see the rebirth (it’s the teachers at the school, which is just as insane as Dan being Gossip Girl in the original series, in my opinion). 

A few years later, though, Ryan Murphy got back to his teen show roots and showcased Glee on FOX. As a theater and speech and debate kid (neither of which Glee is actually about), I’ve always had a kinship with the idea of Glee. It’s the idea living in a “middle of nowhere” state, I think, as I lived in Montana for a few years in high school and did most of my extracurriculars there. Regardless of if it was the vibes, the music, or the camp, Glee was an absolutely huge hit for FOX and Murphy. It was the biggest new show of the 2009-2010 TV season and the only scripted teen show to make the top 50 shows in viewership of that year (the Live +7 count) according to Deadline’s breakdown of the TV season. The pilot originally aired in May of 2009, at the end of the 2008-2009 season, as a promo for the upcoming show. A director’s cut of the episode was then aired as the pilot before the series began its full run, which was truly a sight to behold.

It was in the middle of Glee’s run that streaming video started to look like a future with strong potential in the industry. Breaking Bad had its historic series pop when the first three seasons were placed on Netflix in 2011, just before its fourth season premiered on AMC. This showed that there was some kind of use and utility in putting currently airing shows on streaming—not to mention that the general public seemed willing to go with it. In 2013, House of Cards, Netflix’s first original streaming series, premiered. It was after Gossip Girl had ended, but in the middle of season four of Glee. Soon after, we saw the rise of Amazon Prime Video original programming in 2015 with a whole slate of shows and a pilot program (which would eventually be dismantled, unfortunately). So, while none of those immediately amounted to teen shows, they eventually would—especially when you consider foreign counterparts (specifically thinking about the successes of Netflix UK’s Heartstopper and Netflix Sweden’s Young Royals).

Because, by the time Glee ended in 2015, with slightly lower ratings (but, honestly, not the worst), streaming was deemed “the future.” It would be a few years until more traditional networks got on the train because, while some had platforms already, many didn’t have any original programming. The ones that did, though, hit the ground running. But they weren’t getting into the teen show space… not yet anyway.

Back in broadcast land, though, we find what is largely considered to be the last show of its kind: Riverdale. When the show ended in 2023, it was remarked upon by many, including a great piece over at The Ringer, that with the show ending, there was never going to be another balls-to-the-wall absolutely deranged, and fun, teen show in the “classic” style again. Which, for the record, remains true. Riverdale, created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, was special because it was retro in more than just its roots in the 1940s Archie Comics world and characters. After its first season, which only had 13 episodes, but was a notable mid-season replacement, every single season after had at least 19 episodes. Not to mention that it was doing that many episodes and ran for a full seven seasons.

Riverdale will never be duplicated again, not unless we actually go back to the original timeline—and I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon. Even with Netflix getting really into teen dramas in the time between their first one in 2017 (widely considered to be 13 Reasons Why, the same year as Riverdale), and now in 2024, you’re never getting more than 13 episodes a season and generally no more than four seasons. There are lots and lots of contributing factors as to this, but money (in the many ways we talk about it, as it relates to television) is certainly the major one. When Riverdale ended, an entire era of TV ended with it.

Obviously, I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of teen shows—they’re essential in the landscape and have been since they finally realized that teens were a market worth marketing to. But they look different now. Which isn’t an automatic negative, of course, but there’s a certain cynicism I have about the whole thing, for rather tangible reasons. The longer teen dramas, with messiness baked in, are part of a bygone era. There are no random musical episodes, or couples you couldn’t imagine together at the start, but then the show just went for so long, so why not! You spend less time with characters, and it makes a lot of shows feel a bit more disposable, which is wild. Like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer certainly had filler episodes and bottle episodes, but that show never feels, on the whole, disposable or like a waste of time.

These are the shows that shape the fabric of the future of not just television, but cinema too. Joss Whedon, no matter how you feel about him (badly!) really changed the path ahead for us in all media, especially considering his impact on the superhero film genre and everything that’s come from that. It’s important to know that without the teen shows that flourished within the 20 years surrounding Buffy, our culture would be much more lifeless. I have no idea what the future holds (of both teen shows and television, in general), especially since the end of Riverdale, but I’m a tiny bit hopeful that, as we see the entertainment industry crumble around itself, we might remember that you can try and reinvent it every which way, but television is always gonna be television.