Right now young adult television dramas (think The Summer I Turned Pretty) are proving to be surefire hits – but, it’s who is actually tuning in that might be a surprise… Fiona Ralph looks into exactly why so many Millennials and Gen X’s are so obsessed with the YA genre.
A couple of months ago, I accidentally wandered into The Summer I Turned Pretty fandom wars.
41, married with child, and hotly debating which brother Belly should choose in the young adult television drama that had taken over the internet.
Obviously I had questions.
- Should I be team Bonrad (Belly and Conrad, who have loved each other since they were kids), or a Jellyshipper (Belly and Jeremiah, best friends with benefits)?
- Was it weird to be this invested in the lives of fictional college kids?
- Were these ship wars just a ploy to distract us from the awful name of the series and the creepy plot that sees one person switching back and forth between two brothers she grew up with?
- And most importantly, why do I, and other adult women, love watching teen and YA romance shows and movies so much?
Many older fans on social media were asking the same questions. Reddit was abuzz with middle-aged women questioning their sanity over their obsession with the show. Even actress Jennifer Lawrence, who’s 35, risked the wrath of fans when she said she was team Jeremiah – a controversial take according to the majority of viewers. And 54-year old Tina Dicenso became the face of the older TSITP fan club when her 26-year old daughter started filming her reactions to the series and posting them on TikTok, garnering millions of views.
The Prime Video show, which began when the three main characters (portrayed by Lola Tung, Christopher Briney and Gavin Casalegno) were teens and finished with them at college age, became so popular that following the series finale it was announced that a movie is in the works. And though it targets teenagers and young adults, the show’s main audience is 25 to 54-year-old women, according to analytics firm Luminate.
It’s no wonder the show appeals to us millennials. Series creator and showrunner Jenny Han (also known for the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before franchise and its spinoff XO, Kitty, both on Netflix) is 45. She was 28 when she released The Summer I Turned Pretty, the first book in the trilogy that the series is based on. In the TV series, Jenny invokes our sense of nostalgia by referencing teen movies and shows from the 1990s and 2000s, and including songs from the era she – and we – grew up in, like “I’m Kissing You”, featured in 1996’s Romeo + Juliet (speaking of excellent teen romances).
Closer to home, and similarly heavy on noughties nostalgia, is the Three series n00b. The show, which started out as a TikTok series, has been picked up by Netflix in Australia and has been impressing on the international festival circuit, including being selected for the Short Form section of the Cannes International Series Festival 2025.
n00b is set in Gore in 2005, and sees popular kid Nikau (Max Crean) being outed as gay after his fan fiction (involving Ashton Kutcher and My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way) is leaked. It’s relatable, emotional and also, at times, intentionally cringe-inducing.
Victoria Boult, writer, co-creator and co-director, grew up in Queenstown and says teen tv shows and movies are her favourite genre: “I am so drawn to writing about teenagers because they are absolutely fascinating. Teenagehood is such a weird time – it’s a time of huge emotions, huge stakes, huge relationships and friendships.”
The show is inspired in part by the 27 year old’s experience growing up on the internet, scrolling Tumblr and writing fan fiction, and also draws from co-creator and producer Rachel Fawcett’s formative years spent on Myspace and Bebo.
Victoria says the show has resonated with both teens and adults. “Obviously, the show is intentionally YA; playing into – and subverting – the tropes of the American high school movie. However, it also pulls in an older audience with the nostalgia factor.”
Older adults watching teens and young adults find love isn’t a new thing. From Grease to Clueless, Dirty Dancing to Dawson’s Creek, the teen romance genre has been compelling viewing for all ages for many decades (ironically, many of the actors in these hits, and others in the genre, are actually adults rather than teenagers, however that’s a story for another time!).
Rewatching an old favourite, or watching a sequel or remake, is another way we tap into this nostalgic feeling. Freakier Friday, this year’s sequel to Freaky Friday, has done an excellent job of appealing to those who watched the first one as teens and are now taking their kids along. And speaking of Dawson’s Creek, its stars created hype among millennials this year when they held the live show, the Dawson’s Creek Class Reunion, to raise money for non-profit organisation Fuck Cancer and star James Van Der Beek, who is fighting colorectal cancer.
So why are these TV shows and movies so appealing? It’s likely because they’re often scripted in a way that tugs on our emotions and brings us back to a more carefree time, when we may have been navigating our own first loves or crushes. Rom-coms and romantic dramas can also be an easy escape from real-life relationship or dating issues, or wider problems in the world – of which there are too many to count right now.
Western Sydney University researcher and sociologist Professor James Arvanitakis told ABC News that watching teen shows “captures a sense of nostalgia and for many people, it also captures the idea of looking back at your high school days and a feeling that things were a lot less complicated than they are now,” whether or not that idea is rooted in reality.
It’s as if we can rewrite our own high school experience, and imagine that we are the much- loved protagonist of the show – the one everyone wants to take to prom – or the school ball as it may be.
As Victoria, n00b’s writer, explains, “I just love the heightened stakes of the cinematic teenage world. I always wanted a boy to pump his fist walking across the school field after kissing me – or hold a boom box under my window to serenade me (no one uses boom boxes anymore, but still).”
So the next time you go all in on a new teen or young adult series – or when the The Summer I Turned Pretty movie comes out – no need to be embarrassed, just embrace it for the nostalgic ride that it is.
