Word: showing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...holding. Rowling has been dropping increasingly pointed promises that the four remaining Harry Potter books will turn darker than the first three. "There will be deaths," she says. "I am writing about someone, Voldemort, who is evil. And rather than make him a pantomime villain, the only way to show how evil it is to take a life is to kill someone the reader cares about." Can she possibly mean (oh!) Hermione, (no!) Ron or (gasp!) Harry himself? Rowling discloses nothing, but she does note that the children who contact her "are always most worried I'm going to kill...
...business motive behind these shows--and other new series with major teen characters, or spin-offs of teen hits (The Parkers, Angel, Time of Your Life)--is simple enough: success breeds imitators, and the large (about 31 million), fickle 12-to-19-year-old demographic draws ad money. But the economics alone don't explain the high school vogue, nor why the shows include a couple of the fall's better premieres. True, high school programs are still often mired in soap-opera plots--see the randy Manchester, whose early glimpses just miss so-bad-it's-good status...
...short-lived romantic drama Relativity, whose brooding alien-human love story Roswell follows three teenage aliens as they evade discovery and seek their origins. "It's where so much of you is formed and the themes that will follow you your whole adult life are born." And doing a show about it is a great means of getting noticed. TV has fed the teen beast before, but these programs now enjoy cultural prominence, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek becoming emblems of post-feminist girlhood, sex, violence, name your issue, in a way that Saved...
...takes on body image, eating disorders and virginity, just for starters. Co-creators Ryan Murphy and Gina Matthews talk excitedly about future theme issues: cheating, fame, the social pecking order (Bibb's cheerleader is named Brooke McQueen--get it?). They aim to make, as Murphy calls it, "a Zeitgeist show" that nails the teen experience du jour with rapid-response precision; they repeat "reality" and "real" like mantras...
...adults create a realistic high school show? Does anyone want them to? High school shows succeed by offering sexy fantasies (Dawson) or outlandish stories that ring psychologically true (Buffy). What may save Popular is not its pandering to hipness but its willingness to skewer social haves and have-nots and its satiric, Heathers-ish flourishes (the popular girls, e.g., hang out in a velvety school powder room called "the Novak," as in Kim). Freaks, a sweet and funny character study, is probably the "realest" of the bunch and the best fall drama aimed at any demographic...