1. Young Americans: a teen drama that rewards grown-up appreciation 

This site, "Rawley Revisited," seeks to facilitate and enhance appreciation of Young Americans (YA) an artfully surreal and emotionally edifying but generally underappreciated eight-episode teen television drama created by Steven Antin.  YA was produced by Columbia Tri-Star and Mandalay Television, chiefly in Maryland in May through July 2000, but partly in Georgia in the autumn of 1999.  It was first broadcast on The WB network in the United States from 12 July to 30 August 2000.  It is set chiefly in the fictive town of New Rawley, Massachusetts, the site of Rawley Academy, a fictive gender-segregated elite boarding prep school.

Young Americans has not been re-broadcast or streamed in the United States since August 2000.  Between late 2000 and 2006 it was broadcast in at least eight other countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Sweden) including footage omitted from YA as aired in the USA.  However, YA seems not to have been broadcast anywhere since 2006, and no authorized recording of it has ever been released in any form.

YA's surreal and emotionally edifying artistry

Young Americans, in the words of a Bob Dylan song that appear prominently scrawled on a chalkboard in episode 1, largely "speaks like silence"; to an unusual extent, it conveys its meaning by visual imagery, including props as well as actors' facial expressions and body language, rather than by spoken words.  YA uses visual images, supplemented by its soundtrack music, its allusions to literary works, dramas and films, and suggestive snippets of its dialogue and narration, to tell a tale of moral and emotional rejuvenation and growth in "true love" that is distinct from -- and far more edifying than -- the story told by the words of its dialogue and narration alone.   

The line, "It's not what it looks like," spoken twice in episode 3 of YA, half-spoken but interrupted in episode 4, and spoken truthfully on all three occasions, is also true of YA itself.  Young Americans is not what it seems to be, especially to teenage viewers, on a first viewing.  It is not, as the words of its dialogue and narration suggest until near the end of its last episode, merely a tale of teen loves set in the present and narrated by a teenager.  It is also a mature fiction writer's dream of learning to love truly by reliving his youth in a better way through his writing.

The first of YA's three main love stories:  the "true love" story of Hamilton and "Jake"

That writer -- personified in YA both by Will Krudski, YA's teen narrator, and by Will's father, whom Will loathes and from whom Will flees to attend Rawley -- dreams by writing of attending, as a teenager, a school, Rawley, at which the dean's son, Hamilton Fleming, who personifies the school, teaches true love by example, successively enacting reprises of two classic tales of true love:

• In the first half of YA, the dean's son enacts a tale like "The Frog Prince," Beauty and the Beast," or Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," in which compassion proves strong enough to engender passion, proving that true love is possible.  In YA's version of this tale, cross-dressing substitutes for a magical enchantment as the means of posing a "test of true love," of making a person who needs love seem physically repulsive to someone else whose love that person wants and needs.   When the dean's son, who is straight and wants desperately not to be gay, finally musters the courage to kiss an emotionally needy guy who wants his love, that apparently gay guy, "Jake" Pratt, by partly disrobing, turns into Jaqueline, a straight girl -- but one emotionally screwed up enough to be pretending to be a boy at an all-boys' boarding school.  Consequently, Hamilton flees from her in horror, and for him to kiss her again requires even more courage, born of hours of solitary brooding; that second kiss, the emotional climax of YA, closes its fourth episode.

• From late in YA's fourth episode, when the dean's son turns a gay boy into a horrifyingly screwed-up straight girl by kissing him, until the end of YA, the dean's son enacts a reprise of "Orpheus and Eurydice."  Will Krudski told the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in a spring 2000 episode of Dawson's Creek (DC) in which he appeared in order to transition DC's viewers to YA, which The WB broadcast in DC's Wednesday evening time slot during July and August 2000.  During the second half of YA, the dean's son descends into the emotional hell of his true love in order to rescue her from that hell. 

The parallel contrasting less-than-true love story of Scout and Bella

In every episode, from first to last, YA tells not only the story of Hamilton and "Jake," but also a parallel and contrasting story of less-than-true love.  That story is about Will's roommate at Rawley, Scout Calhoun, scion of a wealthy Connecticut family whose sons have attended Rawley Boys' for generations, and Bella Banks, the daughter of the former wife of Charlie Banks, who owns and operates a gas station on the main street of New Rawley.  Bella (played by Kate Bosworth) and her younger half-sister, Grace, live with Charlie above the gas station and help him operate it. 

• Late in the first episode, a few days after Scout and Bella have fallen in love, Charlie tells them, separately, that Scout's father, once a student at Rawley Boys' and in 2000 a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, is Bella's biological father.  Neither Scout nor Bella ever tries very hard to find out whether that is true.  Bella, who was abandoned by her mother at age six, is too traumatized by fear of loss to risk alienating Charlie and losing the security of their gas-station home for the love of a rich, kind, handsome boy.  Scout fears embarrassing his father, who, having been elected to the Senate in 1994, must stand for re-election in the autumn of 2000.  So Bella and Scout both make do with second-best lovers, Bella finding a better one (Sean McGrail, played by Matt Czuchry) than Scout finds.  For seven episodes, Scout and Bella try to interact as friends rather than as frustrated would-be-lovers, and repeatedly fail, Scout more often and more conspicuously than Bella.  Late in the final episode, viewers learn from Bella's mother (although Scout and Bella do not) that Bella's father is not Scout's father, i.e., that the allegation that Scout and Bella have allowed to separate them is false.

• The Scout-Bella love story contrasts with the "true love" story of Hamilton and "Jake."  Scout and Bella love each other the way most of us do -- much less well than we might.  The Scout-Bella love-story is set chiefly in the town of New Rawley, a proxy for our real world, whereas the Hamilton-"Jake" love story is set chiefly at Rawley Academy, a school concocted to teach us how to love better than we do in reality.

• With irony typical of YA, its only use of the phrase, "true love," is spoken by Bella to Scout near the end of episode 1, when she and Scout first meet after being told separately by Charlie that they are half-siblings.   Bella then asks Scout how long it takes to overcome the loss of a true love -- which the rest of YA will show Scout and Bella never to have had, and in that to differ strikingly from Hamilton and "Jake."  YA's implicit answer to Bella's question is that loss of a true love is an oxymoron (a word that Will uses in episode 7) -- that to love truly, or to feel truly loved, is something that one take to one's grave, even if one loses one's lover, as Hamilton and "Jake" do, at least temporarily, when Jacqueline leaves Rawley at the end of YA's last episode.

YA's two parallel love stories contrast substantively, stylistically and metaphorically

Scout and Bella, like Hamilton and "Jake," fall in love in YA's first episode.  However, the Scout-Bella and Hamilton-Jake love stories are developed in parallel throughout most of YA.  They do not intersect until late in episode 6, when Bella and "Jake" first meet -- and Bella, not being testosterone-poisoned, immediately grasps that "Jake" is not really a boy, something of which Will and Scout remain unaware until episode 8, when they see Jacqueline in girl clothes.  

However, throughout YA, the Scout-Bella love story and the Hamilton-Jake" love story contrast strikingly -- and not only in substance but also in presentation.  The Scout-Bella love story is given far more air time than the Hamilton-"Jake" love story, and is developed far more verbally and less non-verbally than the Hamilton-"Jake" love story.  Bella and Scout voice what they think and feel.  "Jake" and Hamilton speak largely by their deeds, their body language, their facial expressions, and above all their eye-play.  Partly for that reason, partly because the novice actors who played "Jake" and Hamilton (Kate Moennig and Ian Somerhalder) were amazingly good at communicating non-verbally, and partly because the Hamilton-"Jake" story brilliantly modernizes old tales affirming that true love is possible, the Hamilton-"Jake" love story has been far more enthusiastically received by YA's viewers than has the Scout-Bella love story.

Moreover, the contrast between YA's wordy and unambiguous presentation of its less-than-true love story and its more non-verbal and ambiguous presentation of its true love story serves as metaphor for the contrast between appreciating YA merely as what its words explicitly indicate that it is, namely a drama about teen loves set in the present, and appreciating YA as what its non-verbal imagery, allusions, music soundtrack and suggestive snippets of its narration and dialogue convey that it is.  To appreciate YA only as what its dialogue and narration explicit convey is to love YA and to be loved by YA less well than one might, as Scout and Bella love each other.  To appreciate YA as being what its non-verbal imagery, allusions, music soundtrack suggestive snippets of dialogue jointly albeit more ambiguously convey is to love YA and to be loved by YA truly, as Hamilton and "Jake" love each other. 

YA's third main love story, which enfolds the other two:  Will and Rawley

YA also tells a third love story from its first episode to its last:  the story of Will Krudski's love for Rawley, which Rawley reciprocates to Will-as-teenage-student partly through Will's roommate, Scout, and partly through its boys' school's literature teacher and crew coach, Finn, but which Rawley reciprocates to Will-as-grownup-writer chiefly through Hamilton's exemplary love for "Jake,"   which teaches Will that true love is possible.  

Will is a bright working-class boy from New Rawley, the current beneficiary of Rawley Boys' academic scholarship for a "townie."  At the start of YA's first episode, when Will, in his opening remarks as narrator says that he will attend Rawley, he is shown writing, visually conveying that it is by writing that Will attends Rawley.  

In YA's first episode, Will confesses to Scout that he was so desperate to escape from his father and attend Rawley that he cheated on Rawley's entrance exam -- a metaphor for a grown-up writer's "going to Rawley," in his imagination, by pretending to be young again.   When Will tells Scout that he feels that he doesn't belong at Rawley, Scout replies that that's "all in your head" -- as it literally is, insofar as Will is a grown-up fiction writer going to Rawley by imagining it.  Finn, overhearing Will and Scout discuss Will's having cheated on Rawley's entrance exam, allows Will to retake them exam honestly, and asks Will to write an essay telling who he is.  Will writes:  "I am the dream of a better life."  Finn then allows Will to remain at Rawley, partly because he passed the exam honestly, but chiefly because Finn judges, based on Will's essay, that Will is "a writer."  The first episode closes with its soundtrack playing Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's rendition of "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz (1939), a song about travelling, by dreaming, to a place where "the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true."  That song is replayed at the end of YA's last episode, and is also cited in Will-as-narrator's remarks prefacing episode 4, in which Will calls Rawley Academy "this world where dreams really do come true."  

Appreciated literally, Finn's allowing Will to remain at Rawley is utterly implausible; at no school is any mere teacher authorized to forgive enrollment by cheating.  However, appreciated metaphorically, Will's being allowed to attend Rawley because he is a writer, even though he is grown-up, is apt, for Will's going to Rawley by imaginative writing intended to help not only Will but also YA's viewers learn to love more truly.

Rawley also loves Will, admirably well, through his roommate at Rawley, Scout, whom the dean's son obliquely boasts of Rawley's having given Will early in episode 1, in a scene in which Hamilton calls Will's and Scout's dorm room "totally Feng Shui."  Taken literally, Hamilton's description of the room's "Feng Shui," namely that its "doors face east, windows face north," is nonsensical; if the only door to Will's and Scout's room faces east, then its only window faces south.  However, if what Hamilton calls "the Chinese art of placement" is appreciated as a metaphor for the art of placing first-year Rawley students as roommates, then Hamilton's remark is gratifyingly apt.  

Will first sees Scout when Will's father's pickup pulls out of the parking lot of Rawley Boys' after dropping him off there, revealing Scout and his bike just behind where Will's parents had been -- visually presenting Scout as Will's new family.  Scout pretends not to have heard Will's father's parting remark to Will:  "You better hope this works out for you," meaning that Will is not welcome to return to his father's house.  Then, after Scout welcomes Will to their room by saying, "It isn't the Waldorf," and Will indicates that he has never heard of that famous and pricy New York hotel, Scout gives Will the better of the two beds in their dorm room.  When Will indicates that he has never heard of Scout's home town -- Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest towns in the United States -- Scout simply says, "It's about an hour from here."  This kind, gentle tutelage continues for eight episodes, as Scout brings his working-class roommate into his richer, kinder, bigger and more beautiful world, and plainly loves doing it.  

Will-as-teenage-student reciprocates Rawley's love in diverse ways:  by saving it's dean's marriage and Finn's job by preventing exposure of a past love affair between Finn and the dean's wife; by bringing Scout, a senator's son and a prospective future politician, into Will's working-class townie world; and by saving a Rawley girl, Caroline Busse (played by Michelle Monaghan) from abuse by YA's only deliberately malicious character, upper-class Rawley student Ryder (played by Charlie Hunnam), the serpent in Rawley's garden, from whose malice Rawley always manages to bring forth greater good. 

In addition, Will-as-grownup-writer reciprocates Rawley's love by writing about it, by sharing it with YA's viewers, and in particular by sharing the Hamilton-"Jake" true love story.   

Since Will is YA's narrator, the Will-Rawley love story enfolds both the Hamilton-Jake love story and the Scout-Bella love story.  That seems odd if one appreciates YA merely as a drama set and narrated in the present, for most of the Hamilton-"Jake" love story -- unlike the Scout-Bella story -- occurs outside Will's present awareness.  Until episode 6, Will interacts with both Hamilton and "Jake" together only in classes and in crew practices and competitions, and until episode 8, Will is unaware that "Jake" is a girl.

However, if one appreciates YA a dream of a perfect youth, in which a grown-up fiction-writer for whom Will serves as a persona learns to love truly by attending Rawley, then to imagine how Hamilton's loves "Jake" is Will's most  important activity at Rawley. 

The Hamilton-"Jake" love story mirrors the Rawley-Will love story in several ways.  Will, like "Jake," enrolls at Rawley under false pretenses.  Will, like "Jake," does so because he is desperately needy emotionally, and Rawley responds to his neediness, as Hamilton responds to Jaqueline's.  Will needs Rawley as "Jake" needs Hamilton, and the Rawley-personifying dean's son loves Will by loving "Jake,"  by showing Will first that true love is possible and then that it can summon the courage to persist despite seemingly insurmountable adversity, and perhaps the cunning to overcome that adversity. 

Examples of YA's metaphorical use of visual imagery and music

YA abounds in artful metaphorical use of both visual imagery and music.

Arguably the most artful scene in YA is Hamilton Fleming's first appearance, early in episode 1.   As Will enters Rawley Boys' for the first time, accompanied by Scout, whom he has just met, the film camera pans up to show Hamilton perched in a window above the school's front door, looking out through the telephoto lens of his camera at some girls on the grounds of Rawley Girls'.  Hamilton is distracted from his girl-watching by the arrival, on a motorbike, of "Jake" Pratt, who parks "his" bike in a thicket, dismounts, and removes "his" helmet, evoking from Hamilton, as he ogles "Jake," the words:  "Nice bike."  However, whenever Hamilton is shown ogling "Jake" his camera -- as distinct from when "Jake" is shown through the lens of Hamilton's camera -- Hamilton's camera is pointed directly at the film camera -- i.e., at the viewer.

This "nice bike" scene identifies Hamilton with the school, even before Hamilton, in his next appearance (in the "Feng Shui" scene), tells Will and Scout that he is the dean's son.   It also identifies the viewer with "Jake," to ogle whom Hamilton stops ogling girls.  Even on a first viewing, it suggests strikingly, albeit non-verbally, that YA seeks to love the viewer as Hamilton will love "Jake."  

On a second viewing, after the viewer has learned how screwed-up "Jake" is emotionally and why, and how well Hamilton loves her, the "nice bike" scene conveys that YA seeks to save viewers from the despair of true love that afflicts Jacqueline -- despair born of mistaking love for nothing more than sex, despair that episode 5 shows to afflict Jacqueline's mother and to underlie Jaqueline's emotional problems.  On a second viewing, the 40-second-long "nice bike" scene -- in which only seven words are spoken, all by Hamilton -- encapsulates, wholly by non-verbal artistry, YA's critique of contemporary American culture.

Hamilton is again shown perched in the window above the front door of Rawley Boys' in episode 7, as Will and Scout are shown entering Rawley Boys' through that door for the last time in YA.  YA is "framed" between these two images of Hamilton perched in his window over the front door of Rawley Boys' as Will and Scout enter through it, just as YA is "framed" between two playings of each of three songs first played in episode 1 or 2 and replayed in episode 7 or 8 -- Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" (1972), Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's rendition of "Over the Rainbow" (1993/1939), and "Goodbye," by The Crash Poets, which premiered in the soundtrack of YA (2000).

During the "nice bike" scene, YA's most-often played music is first played:  Hans Zimmer's xylophone-and-drums instrumental theme for Tony Scott's 1993 film, True Romance, the first film written by Quentin Tarantino, which metaphorically mocks U.S. mass-market film-makers as drug dealers peddling mindless sex and violence.  That instrumental is played dozens of times in YA, both during most scenes of the Hamilton-"Jake" love story and during most of the many crew-rowing scenes.  The Hamilton-"Jake" love story, YA's "true love" story, is YA's only love story that has its own musical theme from YA's first episode to its last.

Because Zimmer's True Romance theme is an adaptation of Karl Orff's Gassenhauer, a xylophone piece for schoolchildren in Orff's 1920's Schulwerk (a.k.a. Kindermusik), which is an adaptation of a lute tune by Hans Neusiedler (1536), it has always been in the public domain and YA could use it without paying royalties.  However, YA also makes artfully metaphorical use of music too costly to be included in YA's soundtrack, and to which YA merely alludes visually or verbally, such as:  Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero - No Limit" (1964), of which the first line is shown anomalously scrawled on the blackboard of a literature teacher's classroom in episode 1; "Angel" (1997), the best-known song by Sarah McLachlan, fondness for whose songs "Jake" gratuitously cites as evidence that she's a girl, while disrobing to show Hamilton her breasts, in episode 4; Jimmi Hendrix' "Foxey Lady" (1967), to which Hamilton alludes to mock subtly his own calculated reprise its male chauvinism vis-à-vis "Jake" in episode 6; and The Goo Goo Dolls' best known song, "Iris," released in the soundtrack of Brad Silberling's 1998 film, City of Angels, evoked by a poster anomalously shown on the wall above Will's bed in episode 8, despite never having posted there in any previous episode, and the lyrics of which YA uses to speak for Will as YA approaches its end.

Episode 4, which centers on Rawley Academy's only formal dance during its summer term, repeatedly plays, during scenes set in diverse locations, a rendition of "The Way You Look Tonight,"  first sung by Fred Astaire in George Stevens' 1936 film, Swing Time, and reprised twice in P. J. Hogan's 1997 film, My Best Friend's Wedding, to which Scout alludes, saying "Cameron [Diaz] kills Julia [Roberts]," near the end of YA's sixth episode.  YA's use of that song is consummately ironic, in that of all the gorgeous young couples at Rawley's summer cotillion, the only one for whom it ends well is one in which the boy gets past the way his love-interest looks that night.  It is at that dance that Hamilton first kisses "Jake" despite wanting desperately not to be gay.  A seven-note refrain of "just the way you look tonight" plays as Hamilton kisses Jacqueline again just before dawn the next morning -- interrupting her writing of a good-bye note to him -- knowing that "Jake" is a straight girl screwed-up enough to pretend to be a boy at an all-boys' boarding school.  The fourth episode of YA uses "The Way You Look Tonight" to underscore the message of the old test-of-true-love tales that it reprises, that true love is not about physical appearance. 

YA includes more than a dozen crew rowing scenes, all set on Lake Rawley, during most of which Hans Zimmer's "True Romance" theme plays.  Four of YA's five main characters -- "Jake," Hamilton, Will and Scout -- are on Rawley Boy's junior-division crew rowing team, which Finn, their literature teacher, coaches.  Their rowing positions in their serve as metaphors for their rôles in YA.  "Jake" is the coxswain (cox), who, seated at the stern and facing the bow while the eight rowers face the stern, guides the shell (boat) and sets the pace.  Hamilton is the stroke, the rower seated closest to the cox, who leads the other rowers in responding the the cox.  Will is the seven, and Scout the six; seated immediately behind the "stroke," they follow Hamilton-as-stroke's lead in responding to "Jake"-as-cox and lead the other five rowers in doing so.  Metaphorically, YA's crew rowing positions present Will and Scout as following Hamilton's lead in learning to love truly, as the dean's son loves "Jake."  That the five other rowing positions are occupied by non-speaking extras invites viewers to do the same.  YA's playing Hans Zimmer's "True Romance" instrumental not only during most scenes of its Hamilton-"Jake" story-line but also during most crew rowing scenes is a musical metaphor that complements the visual metaphor of its crew rowing positions.     

Lake Rawley, located between Rawley Academy and the town of New Rawley, is the setting not only of YA's crew rowing scenes, but also of the setting of several lakeside literature classes and several swimming scenes.  The crew coach and literature teacher first appears wading into the lake, fully clothed, while introducing simply as "Finn" -- neither a proper first name nor a proper last name but rather a metaphor for his fish-like relationship to the lake, which, coupled with his use of the lake for literature classes, convey.   last name, 

Lake symbolism, cultural heritage - Finn

Anomalous antiques

Final scene -- note in mirror

Beauty, perfection and heaven 

-- exterior settings and interior sets -- perfect life, perfect people, something that wasn't meant for me.  Heaven under our feet as well as over our heads.  Coming here forever.  Way more engaging that Dante's heaven or Milton's.

--   

Why 'Young Americans' is generally underappreciated

YA's being generally underappreciated stems partly from its having been originally broadcast to audiences ill-prepared to appreciate its surreal artistry, and partly from the difficulty of watching it more than once, as is necessary in order to appreciate that artistry. 

The WB network (merged to form The CW network in 2006), YA's original broadcaster and to date its only authorized U.S. distributor in any form, "specialize[d] in shows for and about teens and young adults," as a September 2001 article pointed out.  YA's Nielsen ratings indicate that fewer than two-thirds of its summer 2000 viewers were 18 to 49 years old, which suggests that more than one-third of its original viewers were under 18 years old -- as were nearly all its major-part characters, played by actors who ranged from 15 to 24 years old (Kate Bosworth, born 1983; Gabrielle Christian, born 1984; Naomi Kline, born 1982; Katherine Moennig, born 1977; Michelle Monaghan, born 1976; Matt Czuchry, born 1977; Charlie Hunnam, born 1980; and Ian Somerhalder, born 1978) and for each of whom YA was either a first or second major-part film or TV acting gig.  

Most teenagers are not yet able to appreciate surreal artistry that conveys,  teen viewers The viewers of teen dramas made for mass-market TV networks that cater chiefly to teens, such as The WB (The CW since 2006), tend not yet to be able to appreciate such artistry.  Consequently, such artistry has scant commercial value for the producers and broadcasters of such teen dramas, which therefor rarely offer much of it.   Conversely, people who do appreciate such artistry do not expect to find it in teen dramas made for mass-market TV, which they tend seldom to watch. 

YA's emotional core:  its "true love" story 

•  About whether he succeeds -- whether he joins his Eurydice in the Elysian Fields, as in Ovid's Orpheus does, or merely loses her, as in Virgil's Orpheus does -- YA's ending is challengingly ambiguous.  If one appreciates YA naïvely, then the dean's son is either a jerk or a fool, and fails to save his girl.  By contrast, any viewer who appreciates the dean's son as personifying true love must suppose that he succeeds in saving her -- but YA leaves it to the viewer to imagine how he succeeds.  

The central problem facing the dean's son and his girl throughout the latter half of YA, but which neither of them ever mentions, is how to enable the girl to stop pretending to be a boy without leaving Rawley, or at least without leaving it permanently, so that the dean's son can continue to love her and help her heal.  YA suggests that the dean's son solves that problem during a night of silent brooding before he first kisses the girl knowing that she is a girl, and a deeply troubled and needy one -- but YA never tells how he solves it, forcing the viewer to find a solution as a homework assignment from the school of true love.   In order to find a gratifying solution to the problem posed by YA's ambiguous ending of its "true love" story, one must imagine a way to love truly and effectively even in the extraordinarily difficult predicament faced by the dean's son.  One must attend Rawley oneself, as the writer whom Krudski personifies does, and once there, one must "exceed expectations," as Rawley repeatedly demands that its students do.

YA's last shot is of a mirror on which is posted a letter from the dean informing Krudski that his scholarship has been renewed, that he can return to Rawley next term.  That that note is posted on a mirror indicates that it is intended for the viewer -- assuring the viewer that anyone, at any age, can go to Rawley, that it is never to late to be emotionally rejuvenated by learning to love truly.  Diverse anomalously-antique anachronisms -- from the gender-segregation of Rawley Academy to the 1920s architecture, 1930s neon lighting, 1940s gas pumps, 1950s air pump and a 1950 pickup truck at a gas station at which much of YA is set -- underscore the message that one is never too old to go to Rawley, that YA is aimed not only at teenagers but also at grown-ups who want to continue to grow emotionally but need help in doing that.

However, YA's spoken words first explicitly indicate that YA "is not what it looks like" only near the end of its last episode, when the tense of the drama's narration changes to describe YA's events -- previously described as happening in the present -- as having happened long ago.  Only then can even the most perceptive viewer be confident that what seems surreally conveyed by YA's non-verbal imagery, by its soundtrack music, by its allusions, and by hints in its dialogue or narration was in fact in intended by YA's creator, Steven Antin.

Consequently, only on a second viewing can anyone appreciate YA's surreal artistry whole-heartedly rather than skeptically, as a tentative hypothesis that seems hard to reconcile with YA's being a teen drama made for mass-market teen television. 

Because YA has been broadcast only once in the USA, and no authorized recording of it has ever been released, to watch it a second time has not been easy for many viewers; it has entailed finding viewer recordings of YA posted online at venues like YouTube.   Section 2 of this site, "Resources for watching YA," makes that task easier.

YA's contrasting parallel not-true-love love story

The love story about Rawley's dean's son, Hamilton Fleming, and an emotionally wounded and diversely self-destructive straight girl enrolled at Rawley Boys' by cross-dressing, Jacqueline (a.k.a. "Jake") Pratt, is only one of three love stories told by Young Americans throughout all eight of its episodes.

In Scout's defense, it might plausibly be said that Bella needs him far less than "Jake" needs Hamilton, and that Scout might respond to greater need by loving better.   Scout, like Hamilton, is an emotional savior who can respond to need by loving admirably well.  However, Scout shows that, in YA, chiefly by his often affectionate but never erotically-expressed love for Will Krudski, his diversely needy working-class roommate at Rawley. 

In Bella's defense, it might plausibly be said that her ability to love Scout well is lessened not only by her failure to overcome fears born of her mother's abandoning her, but also by her having long been truly but quietly loved by Will Krudski.  In episode 1, Scout, having just met Bella for the first time, asks Will whether he has ever been sexually intimate with Bella, who is as beautiful as her name suggests.   Will replies that he was "too busy lusting after the school nurse," who "weighed about 300 pounds."  By giving Scout a dumb answer, Will obliquely tells Scout that he has asked a dumb question -- that Scout should be asking not what Will has done with Bella sexually, but how he feels about her emotionally.  Scout fails to get the message, and pays the price throughout the rest of YA.  In episode 4, Will asks Bella to accompany him to Rawley's only summer-session formal dance -- which she does, wearing her mom's wedding dress.  Bella seems to become more mindful of Will's love in the final episode, when Will, having (briefly) lost his scholarship to Rawley, needs her, and when she and Will first spend time alone with "Jake" and Hamilton.  Bella then recalls that Will gave her a bag of heart-shaped candies, "red-hots," ten years earlier when her mother abandoned her; and that night, Bella and Will, alone with "Jake" and Hamilton, are shown being physically intimate.  

YA's third love story, which enfolds the other two

Site contents:  

This "Rawley Revisited" site on "Google Sites" contains nine sections, of which this section, "Young Americans: a teen drama that rewards grown-up appreciation," is the first.   Its other eight sections, conveniently accessible via the side-bar displayed at the left of any page of this site, are the following: 

(2) "How to watch YA," which contains three sections, enables any reader of this site to watch YA in any of four formats, differing in visual quality (resolution), language (English, French or Spanish), file format (FLV or WMV) and size (megabytes).  Three of these formats -- one in English, one dubbed well in French and one dubbed gratingly in Spanish -- are high-resolution and include footage omitted from YA as broadcast in the USA in the summer of 2000.    Section 2 of this site also enables any reader of this side to watch:  a low-resolution copy of the never-broadcast pilot episode of YA, filmed in and around Decatur, Georgia, in the autumn of 1999; high-resolution footage from a scene of episode 5 apparently cut from all broadcasts of YA; and low-resolution copies of nearly two dozen short promotional videos for YA, made by The WB (not by Antin), that aired on The WB during the summer of 2000.  

 (3) "Appreciation of YA" points out that several widely published and ostensibly factual statements about YA are either false or dubitable.  It points out that most published criticism of YA suffers from being informed by viewing of only the first episode or two, and that almost none of it is based on even one viewing of all eight episodes.   It give any reader of this site access to the few published appreciations of YA based on viewings of the entire drama, some of which are unedited and by fans but one of which appeared in an edited scholarly work.  

(4) "Antin on YA" contains nine sub-sections, each of which copies remarks about YA from one of nine press interviews with YA's creator, Steven Antin, of which eight date from the spring or summer of 2000.   

(5) "Scripts of YA" contains eleven sub-sections, each of which offers a script for one of YA's eight aired episodes, for YA's unaired pilot, for its cut scenes, or for segments of the three episodes of Dawson's Creek -- a WB teen drama that aired from 1998 to 2003, and for which YA was aired on The WB as a summer 2000 replacement -- in which Will Krudski, the narrator-character of YA, appeared  in spring 2000 in order to transition Dawson's Creek viewers to YA.

(6) "Music in YA" contains three sub-sections, "Allusions," "Instrumentals" and "Songs," of which the third contains eight sub-pages, each containing information about songs used in the soundtrack of one of the eight aired episodes of YA.

(7) "Info sources" contains two sub-sections, the first describing YA's "Filming locations" and the second showing the chronology of its production and U.S. airing by copying 1999 through 2001 postings on the "news" page of a now-defunct YA fansite. 

(8) "YA photos" offers links to online collections of still shots from YA.

(9) "YA fanfiction," offers links to online collections of YA fanfiction and describes some specific works of fanfiction.

The photo at the top of this page is of the Tyrconnell estate, a private home in Towson, Maryland, a northern suburb of Baltimore.  The exterior and grounds of Tyrconnell were used for exterior and  grounds of Rawley Academy for Boys in filming Young Americans in 2000.  This photo was posted online by a realtor in early 2014 to advertise Tyrconnell, for which more than U.S $ 4 million was asked, and which sold for nearly $ 3.3 million in October of that year.

Ichabod Grubb

First posted November 2010

Last updated March 2024