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Halt and Catch Fire

On last week’s season finale of AMC’s quietly brilliant Halt and Catch Fire (you can keep your Misters Robot; this is TV’s best drama about people who are brilliant at computers but can’t seem to understand those complex machines we call people), viewers were treated to a most unexpected leap forward in time. Suddenly, four years had passed, it was 1990, and our four main characters were getting the bright idea to invent a little something called a “web browser.” One side effect of the four-year time jump, however, was that Gordon and Donna’s eldest daughter Joanie had gone from a tween to a full-blown teen. And not just any teen; a bona fide Shitty TV Teen.

TV has the worst teenagers. Or, okay, let’s narrow that down to: network, cable, and streaming dramas have the worst teenagers. And the more prestigious the TV show, the shittier the teen. On the Halt and Catch Fire season finale, Joanie showed up full of 1990 angst, and since Gordon and Donna had divorced during the four-year time jump, Joanie has become sullen, moody, and disrespectful (or straight-up mean) to her parents. She’s wearing poseur-ish wrist cuffs, she’s suddenly opposed to eating meat (and will tell you why!), and she is physiologically incapable of not rolling her eyes at her dad’s new girlfriend. Of course, this came as no surprise, because all of TV’s shitty teens are the exact same flavor of shitty. They’re sullen. They’re moody. They’re disrespectful/mean to their parents. Additionally (if optionally) they may: take drugs; sell drugs; have older boyfriends; steal things; or get into religion in order to piss off their parents, but they rarely stray from this incredibly narrow formula.

Take a look at Designated Survivor. Even in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on America that kills every major government figure, we still have to put up with Kiefer Sutherland’s shitty, drug-dealing teen. Is his name Leo? OF COURSE his name is Leo! The go-to name for the moody, problematic teen shoved into a show that needs to goose the dramatic stakes for a protagonist who’s also a parent.

Like most things when it comes to television drama, this trend was epitomized by The Sopranos. It wasn’t enough that Tony was struggling to keep his mob family in line and deal with panic attacks and therapy appointments; he had to fight a War at Home as well. So his teenage daughter Meadow was a back-talking brat whose moodiness drove her parents crazy and whose hostility towards them became her defining characteristic. And when Meadow eventually aged out of her terrible teens and became a halfway functional adult, there was her younger brother A.J. to pick up the slack.

These teen characters aren’t just aggravating to watch, they’ve also become depressingly predictable. Every family in a TV drama needs a teen, and every teen is invariably sullen, moody, and unwatchable. And, look, teenagers are awful. Obviously. They drive their parents crazy. If you’re going to bother having a television drama, your characters should have conflict with their children if you want interesting drama. Fine! But there are so many ways you could draw teen characters. Sure, they’re sullen and moody at times. But some of them are dorks; some of them are manipulative; some of them are apple-polishers; some of them are dramatic. There is no excuse to keep writing these cookie-cutter teen characters, particularly when nobody ever likes them.

Here’s a quick survey of some of the most prominent dramatic series of the current TV era and where they stood (or stand) on the Shitty TV Teen scale:

The Sopranos: As described above. Influential shitty teens. 8.5 out of 10 possible shitty-teen points
Six Feet Under: Claire Fisher was a well-drawn, multi-dimensional, thoroughly wonderful television character, and even still she started off as a sullen, moody teenager. 3.5/10
Homeland: While Chris Brody was a sweet kid who only wanted huevos rancheros, Dana Brody was a massively shitty teen, who hit all the marks along the way — drugs? bad boyfriends? weird religious attitudes? — to the point where she nearly abetted a terrorist attack in order to preserve her shittiness. 9.5/10
Breaking Bad: Walter White Jr. started off as a sweet kid, but as soon as his parents’ marriage started falling apart, guess what happened to him? Sullen! Moody! Gave his parents all sorts of attitude? (Okay, so one of those parents deeply deserved it, but still.) 5.5/10
The Leftovers: Particularly in season 1, not only was Jill Garvey a shitty teen, but all her friends were shitty teens too! At least season 2’s shitty teen has the grace to disappear for the bulk of the season. 7/10
The Walking Dead: Ugh, Carl. Pioneering new efforts in the field of Shitty TV Tweens. And now that he’s become a teen, he’s attracting other teens to the story, like that one jerky zombie-bait in Alexandria. Not to mention Enid, as sullen and sulky and moody as any teen currently on TV. 8/10
Fear the Walking Dead: A much smaller cast than The Walking Dead, but just as many shitty teens. That’s a huge difference, per capita. I’m on the record as being pro-Nick, but he’s the textbook definition of this type of teen. But he’s not as much of a jerk to his parents as Chris, the worst teen on all of television, who never met a zombie situation he couldn’t make worse by sulking through it, and then had the nerve to go all dead-eyed-killer about it. 9.5/10
American Horror Story: Murder House: Violet Harmon (Taissa Farmiga) was a classic sullen, moody teenager, up to and including the part where she got a bad/dead boyfriend. 5/10
Smash: Leo Houston (Emory Cohen) was such a massively unlikeable shitty teen that he got mostly written out of season 2. 9/10
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: Buffy started out as a high school show, where its various teen characters were temperamentally diverse and well-drawn. Angel was a detective story with no children in sight. And yet BOTH these shows managed to invent teen characters who appeared out of thin air and proceeded to be the most sullen, moody, terrible teenagers on TV. 8.5/10
The Americans: Paige Jennings (Holly Taylor) is plenty moody (and she certainly ticks that religion box), but The Americans has done a good job of avoiding the Shitty Teen tropes by giving Paige enough storyline in order to make her three-dimensional. 3/10
The Good Wife: Another exception to the rule. While I personally found Alicia Florrick’s teen children to be deeply weird and off-putting — and I couldn’t have been the only one; remember when Alicia said she didn’t even like them? — they were definitely drawn idiosyncratically enough to avoid falling into the Shitty Teen cliches, so props to The Good Wife for that. 1/10