Word: teen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 by the Bell never did. Today you hardly hear the word teen without angst following...
...outside your circle, that social mobility is hardly frictionless. When school brain Lindsay Weir on Freaks, for instance, mixes with a crowd of rebels, she is dallying with kids who, as one puts it, "shoplift in [her] daddy's store." Roswell, likewise, explores nature-vs.-nurture questions through its teen aliens--two were adopted by a well-off family; the other grew up poorer in unloving foster homes--though Katims is cautious not to come off as issue oriented: "If you have a message," he says, "send a telegram...
...There?s an even more chilling option here ?- that maybe we?ve reached the point, after a year of bullets, at which massacred teens just don?t stir our sympathies any more. Maybe the next killer will have to storm a hospital nursery to get his own theme music on the cable news nets. Sorry, Rod Dreher ?- no matter how the "media elite" may wrinkle its nose at the evangelicals, at the Disney-boycotting gays-are-sinners Baptists, we?re not in the habit of ignoring them. Cassie Bernall, shot in the head in the Columbine library because she copped...
...royally," said one survivor, but he was calm enough to both smoke a cigarette and empty three clips of a semiautomatic handgun into hallowed air and young bodies. Now the Wedgwood Baptist Church, on the day of Fort Worth?s annual "See You at the Pole" festival (in which teen Baptists at local schools meet outside for group prayers at the flagpole), is the latest sanctuary to be profaned by random savagery. And Texas is the latest state to wonder whether the guns on the nation?s streets are too many...