3. Appreciation of YA

Appreciated naïvely, as it largely must be on a first viewing, YA tells three distinct love stories set at New Rawley in the present, i.e., in the summer of 2000.  

• One is the story of Will Krudski's love for Rawley Academy, to the boys' school of which Will, a working-class boy from New Rawley, has won admission on an academic scholarship by cheating on the school's entrance exam.  Rawley reciprocates Will's love in part through Will's roommate, Scout Calhoun, and in part through its boys' school's literature teacher and crew coach, Finn (no last name), who, after overhearing Will  that Will has cheated, allows him to re-take the exam and, upon deciding that Will is a writer, allows Will to remain at Rawley.  Inasmuch as Will narrates YA, voicing reflective comments at the beginning and end of each episode, his love for Rawley enfolds YA's other two love stories.

• YA also tells a story about the love between Scout Calhoun, scion of a wealthy Connecticut family whose sons have attended Rawley Boys for generations, and Bella Banks, daughter of a divorced man, Charlie Banks, who owns and operates a gas station on the main street of New Rawley.  Bella and her younger sister, Grace, live with Charlie above the gas station and help him operate it.  

Most published reviews of Young Americans (YA) date from July 2000 and are based only on the first episode.  No newspaper or magazine review of YA known to this site's authors was published, either in hardcopy or online, after more than four of YA's eight episodes had been aired.   Inasmuch as YA's non-verbally developed perspective is first clearly indicated verbally in the closing narrator's epilogue at the end of YA's last episode, it is not surprising that none of these reviews noticed the non-verbally developed surreal aspects of YA.

The only published description of YA that known to this site's authors that is informed by a viewing of all eight aired episodes, and that has been published in an edited venue, rather than on a fan site or other unedited venue, is in an article titled, "Skins' really surreal idealism," in Skins, Visual Culture and Youth, ed. April Sharkey (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013), ISBN: 978-1-84888-255-3, pp. 87-97.  That article suggests that non-verbally developed surreal aspects of the first two series (seasons) of the British teen TV drama Skins, aired in  2007-08, consciously imitated non-verbally surreal techniques used in YA and included, in series 2, episode 6, a recognizable homage to YA. 

This site's authors' appreciation of YA as of August 2010 is summarized in a review of it posted on the IMDB webpage for YA, here.  The text of that review is copied below:

                                                                             *               *               *

The burden of "Young Americans" for grown-ups

 Author: Ichabod Grubb

19 August 2010

Astonishingly, Young Americans (hereafter "YA"), a failed summer teen TV series, rewards critical attention by yielding up an artfully masked burden for adults on such themes as the relationships between passion and compassion, between youth and maturity, between descriptive and normative truth, between what we want and what we need, and between realism and idealism in art.

Like many traditional "children's stories," YA has both a naive meaning for children – in this case, teenagers – and a distinct albeit complementary meaning for grown-ups. However, YA is structured so that its "grown-up" meaning is impossible to understand fully on first viewing; the key that unlocks that meaning, while hinted at from the first scenes of its first episode, it is not clearly revealed until the end of its last episode. This has its reason: appreciation of YA's grown-up meaning is greatly enhanced by having first appreciated only its meaning for children, just as an adult's appreciation of fairy tales is enhanced by having first heard them as a child.

So, until you have watched YA at least once, do not read this review past this paragraph. Instead, go watch YA. Regrettably, no "authorized" recording of YA has ever been released, either in tape or in DVD form; all versions of YA now online or on DVD originate from viewer recordings. ... [No-longer-accurate language about where to watch YA online is omitted from this February 2024 copy.]

The key that unlocks YA's grown-up meaning is an understanding of its narrator's perspective. Will Krudski, the narrator, is a grown-up reliving his youth in the present (2000). Krudski, in YA, is both character and narrator, both young and old at once, and consequently, YA's time-setting is ambiguous; it seems set both in the summer of 2000, its ostensible setting, and at some earlier time no later than 1973, when YA's creator, Steve Antin, was fifteen years old, the age of YA's protagonists.

This temporal ambiguity is disturbingly evident from the very start of YA. Why is a drama ostensibly set in New England in the year 2000 set at two institutions, a gender-segregated prep school and a full-service gas station, that largely vanished from New England in the 1970s? Why is that gas station full of equipment and vehicles dating from the middle of the 20th century? Why does the ubiquitous Coca-Cola (YA's sponsor) come in glass bottles rare in the USA for decades before 2000, and why is it dispensed from a 1930s-model Coke refrigerator? How can a drama ostensibly narrated in the present include events of which the narrator has no contemporary awareness? These questions are answered only by a seemingly casual shift in the tense of Krudski's narration, at the end of YA's last episode, from present to past: "I knew I'd never forget … that summer." As Antin said in a press interview in July 2000, YA is both "about young people at that time of life when the possibilities seem endless ... and about the moments of life when you look back on your youth."

However, Krudski is not reliving his youth as he first lived it; rather, he is reliving it as youth should be, in the hope of recovering youth's passion for "exceeding expectations," of overcoming the complacency of maturity. Rawley Academy, YA's main setting, is Kruski's dream of an ideal youth, "the perfect people, the perfect life … something that wasn't meant for me." Although the protagonists generally seem too good to be true, Rawley's motto redefines "truth" as "virtue" rather than descriptive accuracy, underscoring YA's commitment to idealism rather than realism.

The core of the moral rejuvenation that Krudski seeks, and that YA seeks to inspire in viewers, is ability to love more "truly." The nature of "true love" is the central theme of YA, which develops it by retelling in young ways what Antin called "classic stories" of true love, by rejuvenating myths of true love, which, in turn, rejuvenate us morally. YA's "true love" story-line, in which an emotionally desperate cross-dressing straight girl, 'Jake' Pratt, finds an emotional savior, Hamilton Fleming, the son of Rawley's dean, retells in a young way two such myths: "Orpheus and Eurydice" and "The Frog Prince." In Antin's version of "The Frog Prince," cross-dressing replaces a magical enchantment as the "test of true love" that renders the beloved physically repugnant. Antin's Orpheus, Fleming, personifies compassion rather than passion, exemplifying first compassion's ability to give birth to passion, and then its need to mask itself as passion in order to be effective. Against the bulk of Western tradition since St. Paul, e.g., against Anders Nygren, Denis de Rougemont, and Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, but with Martin D'Arcy, Antin suggests that passion and compassion are complements, and that we might love more truly if we understood this. Interestingly, the current Pope, in his 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, takes the same side as Antin in this ancient debate.

Rawley being a bit of heaven on earth, Providence works more clearly and quickly in YA than in our world; evil reliably brings forth good, and the protagonists invariably get what they need, whether it be what they want or not. But perhaps if we loved more truly, Providence might operate more clearly and quickly in our world, too.

The great mystery of YA is why Steve Antin labored so artfully to infuse so much grown-up meaning into a teen TV series, of which few viewers were likely even to perceive it. Perhaps one day he'll tell us.  [End copied text.]

Comment:  The word "failed" in the first sentence above now seems inaccurate.   The totality of the evidence, of much of which this site's authors were unaware in 2010, suggests that Young Americans is not a "failed" show but rather a gratifyingly complete albeit ambiguously resolved drama filmed chiefly at venues to which Antin knew that he would lose access in or soon after the autumn of 2000, rendering continuation of the show infeasible (per my comments in "YA filming locations" in section 5 of this site).   It seems that there was never any prospect that YA would air for more than eight episodes and that Antin never intended it to do so.  Although Antin, during the spring of 2000, made public comments to the contrary (cited in section 2 of this site, "Antin on YA"), he may have done so partly in order to get the best out of his young actors and his production crew.

A similar appreciation of Young Americans as artfully surreal is conveyed in greater detail and with greater effort at wit by a five-part YA fanfiction series, "Lest Faith Turn to Despair," posted by one of this site's authors on Archive of Our Own (AO3) in 2014 and updated in 2015.   That fanfiction series takes the form of a sequel to YA but also seeks to explain YA and enhance appreciation of it, in part by having characters in the sequel repeatedly discuss their deeds and motives in the original drama. 

A short commercial video, "Par Chance," made by Steven Antin for the Tacori jewelry company in 2012-13, uses some of the same non-verbally developed surreal techniques and visual symbolism that Antin used in Young Americans.   "Par Chance" and description of its similarities to Antin's YA can be viewed on the "Rawley Revisited" channel on YouTube.

The photograph at the head of this page is from episode seven of Young Americans.  It shows Will Krudski (Rodney Scott) tutoring  Caroline Busse (Michelle Monaghan) in the rear garden of Rawley Boys' (the Tyrconnell estate).  Will tells Caroline:  

With poetry, you can't just take things at face value. You've got to dig deeper to find the meaning ...  the truth. And if you can't find it.  You dig even deeper.  Or you ask me for help.

Ichabod Grubb

First posted June 2010

Last updated Februrary 2024