False or dubitable "facts" about YA

Four widely-published ostensibly-factual statements about Young Americans (YA) are either plainly false or highly dubitable and misleading.  Contrary to those statements:  

(1) YA was not a spin-off of Dawson's Creek; 

(2) YA is set not in Connecticut, but in Massachusetts; 

(3) YA's ratings were not low, at least in the opinion of its principal sponsor; and 

(4) YA was not "cancelled" by The WB, but rather seems never to have been intended to continue for more than eight episodes.

(1) Many published descriptions of Young Americans -- apparently starting with an article by Allison Ballard, "Dawson's Creek spin-off planned," published  on March 30, 2000 -- have called YA a "spin-off" of Dawson's Creek (DC), an extraordinarily successful and influential teen drama produced by Columbia Tri-Star and broadcast on The WB for six seasons, from January 1998 to May 2003.   That appellation is false and misleading.

• For example, the Wikipedia article, "Young Americans (TV series)," states:  "The show debuted on July 12, 2000, on The WB network as a summer replacement for, and spin-off from another Columbia TriStar Television production, Dawson's Creek."  The "Trivia" section of the IMDB entry for YA calls it a "short-lived spinoff of Dawson's Creek."  An article published by Entertainment Weekly on April 3, 2018, was titled, "Reminiscing about the summer of Dawson's Creek spin-off Young Americans."  Metacritic, TV Time and even The Internet Archive all call YA a spin-off of DC. 

• However, the Wikipedia article, "Spin-off (media)," states:  "A spin-off or spinoff is any narrative work derived from an already existing work."  Similarly, the Collins English Dictionary defines a "spin-off" as "any product or development derived incidentally from the application of existing knowledge or enterprise," or, more specifically, "a book, film, or television series derived from a similar successful book, film, or television series."  Young Americans is not a "spin-off" of Dawson's Creek in this generally-accepted sense. 

• The WB broadcast YA, one episode weekly, from July 12 to August 30, 2000, at the same Wednesday evening hour when The WB broadcast DC during most other weeks of that year, thereby allowing DC's cast and crew to take a summer break. 

• In order to transition DC's viewers to YA, the narrating character of YA, Columbia Tri-Star had Will Krudski, played by Rodney Scott, appear in three episodes of DC during the spring of 2000:  season 3, episodes 19-21, broadcast from April 26 to May 10, 2000.  (Transcripts of those episodes' scenes in which Will appears are given in the Scripts section  of this site.)

• However, the main characters, five lead actors, place setting, and story-lines of Young Americans as broadcast in the summer of 2000 are those of the unaired pilot episode of YA filmed in and around Decatur, Georgia, in the autumn of 1999, as is evinced both by the transcript of that unaired pilot episode and the low-resolution copy of it accessible via this site.   

• Only after that unaired pilot was completed did the president of network production at Columbia Tri-Star have the idea of using YA as a summer 2000 fill-in for Dawson's Creek, per Josef Adalian and Michael Fleming, "WB seeks 'Young' blood," Variety, December 12, 1999. Susan King, "A Closer Look" Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2000, cited Steven Antin as stating:  "I created Young Americans, and only after the fact did the studio and the network get together and say, 'Why don't we do a cross-promotion with Dawson's Creek. I thought 'Wow, I'm a lucky guy.'"   

(2) A less important widely-published falsehood about Young Americans is that the fictive town of New Rawley, where most of YA is set and where its fictive Rawley Academy is located, is in the state of Connecticut.  That misconception, which may have originated in one of the many never-updated reviews of YA that appeared in July 2000, based on a viewing of only its first episode, no longer appears in the English-language Wikipedia article about YA, but persists on the homepage of the IMDB entry for YA, which describes Rawley Academy as "an elite school in Connecticut."  It also persists in many other online venues, as a Google search for "Young Americans" "Rawley" and "Connecticut" quickly shows.

• Near the start of episode 4 of YA, Bella Banks tells Sean McGrail that Bella's father, who operates the gas station at which Bella is working, " in Boston renewing our business license."  Inasmuch as Boston is the capital of Massachusetts, this indicates compellingly that New Rawley is a town in Massachusetts, not Connecticut.

• YA's only reference to Connecticut that bears on the location of New Rawley is Scout Calhoun's statement to Will Krudski, early in episode 1, that Greenwich, Connecticut, the the town from which Scout hails, is "about an hour from here," i.e., from New Rawley.  Even towns the towns in Massachusetts that are closest to Greenwich, such as Great Barrington in southwestern Massachusetts and Springfield in south-central Massachusetts, are at least 100 miles (160 km) by road from Greenwich.  One can drive from Greenwich to Springfield by controlled-access highway; to do so at 60 miles per hour takes about 1.75 hours, but drivers commonly go as fast as 75 mph on that highway without being stopped by police.  At that speed, one can drive from Greenwich to Springfield in less than 1.5 hours, i.e., in "about an hour."  Moreover, Scout's remark to Will is not intended to be precise; Scout says it in context of working-class Will's never having heard of Greenwich, one of the richest towns in the U.S., not in context of informing prospective travel to Greenwich by Will.  

• Bella's statement to Sean in episode 4 is far clearer and more reliable as an indicator of the state in which New Rawley is located than is Scout's remark to Will in episode 1.  All that Scout's remark adds to what Bella's remark tells us about New Rawley's location is that it is not in eastern Massachusetts, all of which is substantially more than "about an hour from" Greenwich by any form of land transportation.  However, the only aspect of Rawley's location that matters is that it is in New England, where the best boarding prep schools in the U.S. have long been concentrated, and where even the public (state) schools have long tended to be better than in most of the U.S. 

(3) It has repeatedly been suggested publicly that YA's summer 2000 ratings (measures of how many viewers watched it) were lower than its producers, sponsor or broadcaster had expected or had hoped for ( thereby contributing to YA's not having continued for more than eight episodes).  That is dubitable.

• For example, the Wikipedia article, "Young Americans (TV series)," states:  "Despite being a spin-off of one of the most popular WB shows, Young Americans received low ratings throughout its summer run and was cancelled in August 2000."   This same statement occurs in the entry for YA on Alchetron.

• By contrast, an article Jim Lovel, "Coke TV may air on NBC," published by The Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 11, 2002 -- which the Wikipedia article on YA references -- cited Mart Martin, director of public relations for Coca-Cola North America, YA's principal sponsor, as saying:

Coke liked the results it got from Young Americans. ... It got a respectable 2 percent of the available viewers (about the same rating as other prime-time shows on WB) during its run ...  That success is the reason Coke is interested in doing it (buying a title sponsorship of a TV show) again on NBC.  

Similarly, Episode Ninja's entry for YA states that "The show ... did extremely well in the ratings."

• Coca-Cola, which was YA's principal commercial sponsor, although not its only commercial sponsor, paid $6 million of its production costs, per Joe Flint, "WB's New Prep-School Drama Gives a Starring Role to Coke," The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2000.  David Zurawik, “Pretty as a Picture,” Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2000, cited Steven Antin as stating that YA cost "a million dollars an episode" to produce."  Lovel's above-cited February 2002 article stated:  "Industry insiders estimate an hourlong series like Young Americans would cost about $500,000 an episode to produce."  Those articles jointly indicate that Coca-Cola's payment alone covered at least three-quarters and perhaps all or even more than all of YA's production costs -- and Coca-Cola, according to its above-cited director of public relations for North America, considered that investment successful.    

• YA's raw Nielsen ratings were:  2.3% of Nielsen-monitored households (an estimated 2.87 million viewers) for YA's first episode, aired July 12, 2000;  1.7% for its second episode, aired July 19; 1.6% for its third episode, aired July 26; 1.8% for its fourth episode, aired August 2; 1.6% for its fifth episode, aired August 9; 1.6 for its sixth episode, aired July 16; 1.6% for its seventh episode, aired August 21; and 1.8% for its eighth episode, aired August 30.   About one-third of YA's summer 2000 viewers were not  18-to-49-years old; they presumably were mostly 17 years old or younger.

• In judging whether those ratings were "low" or not, one must remember that a TV show's producer, broadcaster or sponsor assesses its raw rating score in context of its production, leasing or advertising cost, the size and spending of its target audience, and available alternatives for reaching that target audience.  As Jane Rosenzweig pointed out in an article, "Reality Lite," published in The American Prospect on September 9, 2001, "The WB specializes in shows for and about teens and young adults -- that small but prized demographic we've been hearing about since advertisers discovered how much money they spend," and therefore the WB "finishes regularly at the bottom of the Nielsens."   

(4) It has often been stated publicly that only eight episodes of Young Americans were produced because The WB cancelled the show.  However, that more than eight episodes of YA were ever intended is highly dubitable.

• That The WB "cancelled" Young Americans is stated not only by the above-cited Wikipedia article on YA,  ***  In addition, YA has often been called a "short-lived" show, implying that it might have been longer-lived if it had been more successful commercially.  

• However, the WB, in announcing, on September 20, 2000, that it would not broadcast any more episodes of YA than the eight that it had broadcast in July and August, took pains not to present that as a cancellation, and not to present YA as having been deemed unsuccessful by its broadcaster.  That announcement, which responded to a fan campaign to induce The WB to continue Young Americans, took the form of this posting on The WB's online public message board:

Subject: Young Americans

Author: From The WB (205.173.143.35)

Date: 09/20 10:40

Dear fans of Young Americans,

We'd like to thank you for your interest in YOUNG AMERICANS and for helping make its limited summer run a success.

We bought eight episodes of YOUNG AMERICANS to give viewers like you a fresh alternative to summer reruns. We aired the entire run and we're glad you enjoyed it. At this time, we have not ordered additional episodes of the series.

Thank you,

The WB Television Network

• After The WB announced that it would not broadcast additional episodes of YA, some YA fans tried to induce MTV to broadcast a continuation of YA, and some young actors for whom YA had been a first major-part acting gig encouraged that effort.  However, nothing is known to suggest that anyone involved in YA's production -- including its creator, Steven Antin -- ever submitted even the most tentative proposal for any continuation of YA either to The WB or to MTV.

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