Teenage wasteland

These days, TV attracts young viewers with stories of characters like them - complete with angst, alienation, and spiritual hunger

By Matthew Gilbert

''Why can't I feel,'' sang Buffy in a recent episode of ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' the series on which teenagers go through hell - literally. She'd already found eternal bliss in heaven, but after a rude awakening of John Miltonian proportions, she lost paradise when her Scooby pals summoned her back to her so-called earthly life. Talk about teen angst; poor Buffy can't even enjoy the simple joys of resurrection.

Life in the pimple lane: It has never been easy, as adolescent demons forever haunt the malls, locker rooms, and cafeterias of America. Even Wally Cleaver had to cope with the endless stunts of his little brother, the Beav, back in the 1950s.

But being a teenager on TV in 2001 - and there are very many of them right now - is about as light and breezy as a long, dark night of the soul. Forget about the innocent challenges of flirtation and infatuation. Forget about exfoliation, and the sting of the Stridex pad. Today's TV teens wrestle with nothing less than alienation, isolation, spiritual hunger, and the emotional pitfalls of irony. When it comes to coming-of-age TV, the phrase teenage wasteland is more T.S. Eliot than Pete Townshend.

The WB is the most obvious factory packaging these heavy-hearted kids. The youth netlet has pushed the ''Afterschool Special''-style issues of ''Beverly Hills 90210'' to a new level of discontent with the wordy and world-weary teens of ''Dawson's Creek.'' And by introducing ''Roswell'' and ''Buffy,'' both of which moved to UPN this season, the WB has displayed a great flair for turning sci-fi and horror myths into metaphors for teen pain. Its latest reinvention is ''Smallville,'' which uses the story of Clark Kent/Superman to convey the psychic dislocation of a Midwestern Everyboy. ''Smallville'' established its pathos in its first episode, with the stunning shot of a boy strung up in a cornfield with an ''S'' on his bare chest. That image, used in the ad campaign, suggested that the gay murder victim, Matthew Shepard, might be the series' guiding spirit, its St. Sebastian-esque martyr.

But teenage torment now flourishes on the mainstream networks and cable channels, too, usually in series whose ensembles include adults. ''Once and Again'' continues to mine the traumas of its three teen characters, from identity crises to anorexia, with astonishing honesty. ''ER,'' ''Pasadena,'' and ''The Education of Max Bickford'' give us unhappy daughters, some of them on a search for big truths, while ''24'' recalls the movie ''Traffic'' as its rebellious teen is drawn into drug-related dangers. And ''The Sopranos,'' ''Queer as Folk,'' and ''Six Feet Under'' provide explicit plots featuring the most realistic teens on TV, particularly Claire on ''Six Feet Under,'' who has waged a passionate battle against cynicism and loneliness as she copes with the death of her father. Her mode of transportation? A hipped-up hearse.

The only smiley-faced teens on TV dramas these days are probably to be found in a nostalgia zone such as TV Land. Network executives vying for youth-market ratings know that to portray the millennial generation as insulated or carefree would be absurd - as it is in the 1998 movie ''Pleasantville,'' in which two teens get stuck inside a 1950s TV show. The world is too much with today's kids, edited down and flashed in their faces by TV and the Internet. They're too knowing to watch themselves reflected on the small screen as innocent or happy-go-lucky. The networks know that in order to grab young viewers, their dramas need to meet kids on their own level, delve into their dramas, and not dismiss them in favor of the adult stories.

It's not just media overload complicating the lives of TV teens. The latchkey phenomenon continues to thrive on TV, as young TV characters live in the wake of one kind of abandonment or another. Some - Buffy, Claire, Nell on ''Max Bickford,'' Lana on ''Smallville,'' and Joey and, recently, Dawson on ''Dawson's Creek'' - have experienced parental death. Others are the children of divorce, who find themselves in joint- or single-custody hell. This season, ''Once and Again'' has been the anti-''Brady Bunch,'' as its two sets of children and four parents struggle to coexist peacefully, while ''ER'' leaves the hospital to showcase Rachel Greene's post-divorce rage. And some are without parents for supernatural reasons, notably the aliens on ''Roswell.''

Parental self-involvement, too, is a form of abandonment that isolates TV teens. In a dance of sorts, they face ''adult'' psychological issues while their parents relive their own teen years. Often, the parents are middle-aged baby boomers going through a second youth, particularly if they are back on their feet after a divorce.

On the comedies, it's a joke: The parents embarrass their children by doing something immature or playful, or by their dinosaur tastes in music. It's a theme on ''That '70s Show,'' ''Grounded for Life,'' ''Maybe It's Me,'' and ''My Wife and Kids,'' and one oft-repeated punch line has the teenager cringing at information about his or her parents' sex life.

On the dramas, though, the distracted parent is a source of anxiety and disconnection, as it was in the movie ''American Beauty.'' Claire on ''Six Feet Under'' - created by ''American Beauty'' writer Alan Ball - might as well be raising herself, as her mother pursues a second chance at happiness.

Of course, this being television, there is a fantasy element to the presentation of these kids. They may not be the magazine-perfect Gwyneths and Heathers who rule the school's coolest cliques, but they certainly are good-looking, well-dressed, and financially secure. No one - not the networks, not the writers, not the producers - is pretending to reach for the gritty realism of a documentary. Even when TV presents heartache and suffering, it glazes and prettifies, to allow viewers some escapism and to inspire advertisers. The kids on ''Dawson's Creek'' may be miserable, but their homes are as idyllic as their dialogue is sophisticated.

But beneath their TV-ized surface, many of these shows try to portray growing up as an act of courage, and not only of fashion. Teen music may be dominated by the calorie-free likes of Britney Spears, but teen TV sounds more like Staind's ''Outside'': ''I'm on the outside / I'm looking in / I can see through you / See your true colors / Inside you're ugly / Ugly like me.'' It's a far cry from ''Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love.'' __ Boston Globe (November 25, 2001)