Published appreciations based on viewings of at least four episodes

Adele Marley, "American Pie," Baltimore City Paper, August 9, 2000, formerly at http://www2.citypaper.com/film/story.asp?id=4541 (no longer online)

If you've got the nerve to put the word "American" somewhere in your TV show's title, the program had better be about something profound, mind-blowing, broad-scoped, star-spangled, or limitlessly expansive--from sea to shining sea. You'd better be talking about a clear-cut phenomenon so colossal in scope that every single individual in the United States who draws breath can get down with it. You'd better be coming to our town, helping us party it down.

Well, OK, sure--most inhabitants of the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave have probably been high school students at some time or another. But they most likely haven't set foot in institutions even remotely resembling the WASPy, honey-shellacked hives featured in both the WB's Young Americans, set in a tony New England prep school but shot in and around Baltimore, and Fox's American High, a documentary series featuring students from a school in an upper-middle-class Chicago suburb, similar to the ones immortalized in those John Hughes movies from the '80s.

And yet the WB and Fox, who are both apparently under the gun for failing to score any significant prime-time ratings coups during this long, reality-hypnotized summer of 2000, have decided to put their little American-teen potboilers on in a competing Wednesday-night time slot. These smaller networks had better regroup fast, because the latest Nielsen data shows that both programs are getting the crap kicked out of them by CBS' Wednesday-evening installment of that zzzz-fest Big Brother, which benefits tremendously from having Survivor as its lead-in.

Despite their rather significant difference -- one's fictional, the other isn't -- Young Americans (which debuted in mid-July) and American High (which premiered Aug. 2) mirror each other in their focus on teen-centered turmoil stemming from 1) overly complex, sophisticated relationships with peers and 2) absentee parents, figuratively or otherwise.  (In fact, it's clear on both shows that the 'rents' absence results in these kids clinging so fiercely to each other.)  Another similarity: Both are boring as hell, Young Americans because it has the kineticism of molasses, American High because its painstakingly recorded kitchen-sink reality is so it eminently predictable.

Young Americans is a visually arresting series, beautifully photographed with a competent, attractive cast and stunning sets and locales. The program focuses on a group of guys attending a prestigious boarding school that apparently serves as an entry into the fabled Old Boys' Network. Among the students, there's a charity-case townie (Ocean City homeboy Rodney Scott) who delivers many a lyrical voice-over; a silver spooner (fetching Mark Famiglietti) who's hot for his flaxen-haired, illegit half-sister (Kate Bosworth); an androgynous pixie (Katherine Moennig) who cops prepster-boy drag to make herself eligible for enrollment, inspiring a sexual-identity meltdown for a would-be suitor in the process. ("We're gay!" declares Ian Somerhalder as the alarmed beau, after locking lips with her.)

Of course, all these lurid goings-on are rather poorly explained. Moennig's character doesn't get enough attention from her jet-set mommy, which is supposed to justify her foray into deceit and cross-dressing. Whatever happened to legitimate excuses for donning male drag, like: I'm having a sexual-identity crisis (Boys Don't Cry); I want to study the Talmud (Yentl); I'm a cub reporter trying to blow the lid off high school sexism (Just One of the Guys); I'm entering a butch-realness competition (Paris Is Burning). C'mon!

Also, the more sensational, edgy flourishes in the script are sanitized considerably. Young Americans does its best to recapture the romanticized, wholesome allure of the Eisenhower era: Characters congregate and confront each other at cotillions (!), drive-in movies (at Bengie's, natch), and corner pop shops. Nobody drinks, smokes, doses, or cusses. Small-town ambiance (Havre de Grace's own) is favored over the tractlike ubiquity of the suburban landscape that is probably more representative of viewers' environment. The only really telling clue that Young Americans is set in Y2K (besides the frank handling of homosexuality and the curious carte blanche on incest) is that one character recites lyrics from one of those rambling Macy Gray songs in his outdoor poetry class.

American High, on the other hand, is so very now--and so very tiresomely so. ... 

Emilia Hwang, "Universal themes depict real life with ‘Americans’: Series spins web around other shows, lends depth to characters," Daily Bruin (UCLA), July 30, 2000, at http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2000/07/universal-themes-depict-real-l 

Maybe you haven’t heard of the prestigious Rawley Academy, even though it’s one of the most exclusive boarding schools in America.

Perhaps you’ve vacationed in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and yet never been to Capeside.

If these places don’t ring a bell in the campanile of reality for you, don’t worry – they’re all made up.

That’s right. There is no Rawley Academy. There is no Dawson and he doesn’t really have a creek.

On July 12, the WB premiered its latest teen drama “Young Americans” strategically in the time slot directly following “Dawson’s Creek.” The same criticism, however, that plagued its predecessor seems to apply to this new series as well.

I’ve heard people say that “Young Americans” is unrealistic. One look at Will Krudski and you’d say: “Whoa, he looks way too old to be 15 years old.”

Well, of course he does. First of all, Will is not a real person. He is a character played by actor Rodney Scott, who is 22 years old in real life.

Which brings me to another point: What is “real life”anyway?

If I wanted to see the face of reality, I’d sit in front of my bathroom mirror for an hour every night after dinner. But because the real world isn’t all that great sometimes, I choose to spend my Wednesday evenings watching a show that relieves me from the truth of my own mundane existence.

In reality, UCLA’s summer session A is a woeful routine comprised of atrocious midterms and never-ending chapters about the theory of human communication. At Rawley Academy, summer school is a whim for the young and the beautiful who spend their sunny days rowing crew and frolicking in a dazzling blue lake.

What would you rather watch?

A television show does not have to be based on actual people in actual situations to be deemed worthwhile for general viewing.

A truly captivating show, however, needs to have more than just visual appeal to captivate this astute TV watcher. “Young Americans” is more than just blue-eyed beauties in trivial adventures – these gorgeous guys and girls are on an incredible journey.

The remarkable thing is, they never have to leave their New England town, because their extraordinary odyssey is one that spans the adolescent mind and soul. The theme here is pretty universal – teenagers struggling to find their identity.

And just like the teens in “Dawson’s,” the Rawley kids talk about life as if they know everything there is to know – at the age of 15.

But that’s the beauty of being young – you don’t know enough about “real life” to know that you haven’t got a clue. And at the same time, the world of a teenager doesn’t have to be larger than your parents and the girl who lives down the creek to cause confusion, frustration and grief.

Look at those “Dawson’s” kids. They’ve known each other all their lives and they’ve never left Capeside. Not to mention, their extensive vocabulary is larger than the average SAT prep book. Yet, they still can’t communicate their most essential fears and desires to one another. What could be more realistic than that?

In “Young Americans,” the kids come from different pasts and face different futures together. One look at the seemingly generic story lines and you’d say: this show is too predictable.

But, isn’t the process of growing up a little predictable at times? Your parents watched you make the same mistakes they made. And you’ll probably watch your kids make the same mistakes that you made.

Why not watch the kids at Rawley make some mistakes while you’re at it?

Finally, if you think that all the shows on the WB network are the same, they’re not.

Sure Rodney Scott looks a little familiar. That’s because his character, Will, recently appeared in “Dawson’s Creek” as a long-lost friend of Pacey (Joshua Jackson).

I learned about this in my English class. It’s called intertextuality and it’s at the core of human existence. Everyone is an individual yet we are all connected.

In literature, intertextuality is the weaving of outside texts within a story. In life, it is the intertwining of similarly unrelated situations or people, like the popular theory of six degrees of separation.

Our lives may steer down divergent paths, but they all eventually lead back to a single point of convergence. The bottom line is we are all familiar with the same stories, players and settings, no matter how divergent our paths may be .

In literature, life and television, intertextuality adds a remarkable layer of richness to otherwise isolated and irrelevant instances.

In bringing together its network genealogy and its $6 million sponsor, “Young Americans” makes playful references to it’s WB cousin “Felicity” while integrating its Coca-Cola product placements into its rich plot. What genius – the WB must be where philosophers and poets go when they die.

Don’t get me wrong, “Young Americans” is far from being the perfect show. In fact, it is sometimes so bad, it’s embarrassing to watch. But it seems to me that that feeling of vicarious humiliation and self-consciousness is also at the core of growing up.

So even though there is no “real life” Rawley Academy or Capeside to visit, their fictitious inhabitants exhibit enough raw emotion and young hope to keep this aging American glued to the tube.

Jane Rosenzweig, "Reality Lite," The American Prospect," November 9, 2001, at https://web.archive.org/web/20170921001541/http://prospect.org/article/reality-lite

So, like, okay. It's the first day of boarding school, and you're the new kid. Not only that, but you're not like these other boys. You're on scholarship. Your name is Will Krudski, and you feel guilty because you bought the school's entrance exam on the Internet. You know this was wrong, but you didn't know if you could pass the test on your own, and you had to. Your father hates you and he scares you, and you need, more than anything, to get out of his house.

At your new school, Rawley Academy, all the kids are rich, including your roommate Scout. He's a decent guy, but he has his own issues: He's falling in love with a townie named Bella, and some heavy stuff is about to land on them. In the meantime, there's new-kid hazing to contend with, and you end up standing in the center of town in your underwear. Luckily, you're good looking -- you and Scout look better in your boxers than most people look dressed -- so when the girls in town laugh at you, it's, like, no big deal. Welcome to the world of the WB Network's latest teen drama, Young Americans, which premiered July 12, for an eight-episode summer run.

For those of you who have managed to avoid the hype that has surrounded the WB since its inception three years ago, here's a primer: 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 although other networks occupy particular niches -- CBS is known for its older audience and NBC for its must-see sitcoms, for example -- no network is quite as distinctive as the WB. If you were to come upon Young Americans (or Dawson's Creek or Felicity or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Jack and Jill or Roswell), while channel surfing, you would recognize WB-land immediately. The girls, played by actresses at least a few years older than their characters, sport flawless skin and a trademark faraway look in their slightly glassy eyes, as if they are looking ahead to a time when they will no longer have to play teenagers, and the boys are, well, pretty. The scenery has a luminous, unreal quality, whether it's the New York in which the title character of Felicity is filmed crossing the street in slow motion or the fictional, unseasonably mild Cape Cod town of Dawson's Creek. In short, the teen years are portrayed on the WB not as they are (more realistic portrayals like ABC's critically acclaimed and quickly canceled My So-Called Life and last season's Freaks and Geeks proved that too much reality is too much to take on a weekly basis), but as we adults would like to remember them. On the WB, the teen years are bathed in soft, flattering light, a time when your friends looked at you as if you meant the world to them, and even misery, when accompanied by the right soundtrack, had an enticing beauty to it.

The uniformity of production values and plot lines (boy meets girl, boy meets another girl, boy gets one or both of them, except in Buffy and her spin-off Angel, in which adventure occasionally trumps romance) makes choosing a WB drama a lot like shopping in the no-surprise franchise stores of an American mall. Indeed, the titles of the network's series read like a list of perfume scents. Are you more turned on by the aura of Felicity (wide-eyed co-ed seizes the day in New York City) or 7th Heaven (minister's family finds happiness through being good to friends and neighbors) or Safe Harbor (canceled this season, so I guess not) or Charmed (sexy witches sacrifice to protect their fellow citizens) or Popular (the name says it all)?

It's all too easy to make fun of, and the critics have done so--at great length. What they seem less likely to notice is that WB shows tend to be well-written and populated by interestingly (if not too believably) articulate teenagers. And in spite of a healthy dose of melodrama--in the pilot of Young Americans alone, the ensemble cast faces cheating, incest of Greek tragedy proportions, adultery, and a Shakespearean girl-masquerades-as-boy plot all at once--there is something at the core of these shows that is worth noting. While WB-land is certainly not real, it has a breadth of focus that's far more true to life than the so-called reality-based shows like MTV's Real World and CBS's summer hit Survivor. Unlike the participants in these shows, the teens on the WB are characterized by both conscience and moral concern.

In this way, the WB features a conception of teenhood that is also markedly different from the big screen's. In supposedly era-defining films like Risky Business and Fast Times at Ridgemont High and last year's hit American Pie, teenagers are self-involved pleasure seekers with little more on their minds than sex and occasionally love. In contrast, the teens of Young Americans, like their WB predecessors, are preoccupied with navigating their way into adulthood within some (albeit vague) moral framework. Don't get me wrong: The WB is neither preachy nor intellectual, and it never transcends the sanitized morality of network television. But what does distinguish WB teens from other pop culture teens is a sense that doing the right thing is hard but worthy work.

Ten years ago, viewers frustrated by the stream of summer reruns had an opportunity to tune into the FOX network for all new episodes of Beverly Hills 90210. It was a successful marketing ploy for FOX, leading to another nine seasons for that teen show, and it may be that the WB has the same hopes for this summer run of Young Americans. Early 90210 was also similar to Young Americans in its focus: Twin teen transplants from Minnesota to Beverly Hills were, like Will Krudski (Rodney Scott), less privileged than their new peers and struggling to maintain their moral center. But it was only a matter of a few seasons before the twins were as caught up as everybody else in the web of ways in which money corrupts. By then, the FOX network itself was evolving from its position as a pioneer of teen-oriented entertainment to a home for trash TV (Melrose Place; Models, Inc.) reminiscent of 1980s hits like Dynasty and Dallas, in which wealth and the backstabbing and conniving of the wealthy were glorified. That could be the fate of Young Americans, too, if imaginations at the WB succumb to temptation -- or to the pressures generated when a network finishes regularly at the bottom of the Nielsens.  But so far, in contrast to what developed on 90210, the teens of the WB seem exceedingly mature. While 90210 heartthrob Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) struggled with alcoholism and fast cars, Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek) and Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson), the best friends and co-heartthrobs of Dawson's Creek, spend their time emoting, as often to one another as to their girlfriends.

On the WB, teens often talk--and talk like adults. They can approach relationships with a paralyzing self-awareness. In the pilot of Young Americans, Scout (Mark Famiglietti) and Bella (Kate Bosworth), after one kiss, discuss marriage. For the most part, the teens raise themselves; parents are silly and irrelevant (or, as in Young Americans, simply absent). This is a staple of the genre, of course, but here it seems to produce as much maturing as it does hell-raising. Will Krudski fears his father, but he isn't wallowing or acting out; he's trying to get away and get an education. These kids are nothing if not earnest.

Truth be told, their stolid and pervasive tolerance makes most of their problems less urgent than they might otherwise be. On 90210 you generally had to watch your back, especially if you had no money; on Young Americans, the person most bothered by Will's blue-collar poverty is Will himself. Similarly, when a gay character on Dawson's Creek was shunned by his father for coming out, he quickly found acceptance with a friend and her Christian grandmother, ultimately teaching his father a thing or two. On the one hand, this too is a remarkably sanitized version of real-life difficulties (on the WB, poor and good looking always go hand in hand, and it's easy to be tolerant when you're all beautiful and white). On the other hand, the difficulty of doing the right thing in the face of the real world's mixed signals is at least on the agenda.

Is this because of the times in which we now live? When 90210 came on the air, we were at the end of the Reagan era of vast greed among the few and economic recession for everyone else; a preoccupation with rich people and their stupidity may have been appealing to liberal Hollywood and frustrated viewers. Now, when money is more plentiful, is it possible we've turned to other plots because we have the economic luxury to contemplate--and value--moral behavior? The enormous popularity of this summer's Survivor proves that backstabbing still sells. But the WB's high ranking among teenagers (especially girls) suggests that earnestness also has a quite significant following. There is plenty of premarital sex on the WB and much else that wouldn't qualify as "moral" to many voters, but there is also something pure about the aspirations of so many of these teens to grow up and be a good person and to understand what doing so entails.

 If Young Americans takes off, we may see townie-chic evolve in teen fashion. We will no doubt see the actors who play Will and Scout hit the big screen. And we will probably also see the furthering of another trend, a kind of morality play-lite, in which for every soundtrack moment, there is a little bit of Shakespeare. Will Krudski, with his self-doubts and good looks, is part Hamlet, part Backstreet Boy, and part the kid we all knew growing up and wanted to be. This is typical of the WB and probably explains why I have heard Rhodes scholars, mothers, law students, college professors, and Peace Corps volunteers regularly weighing in on the relationship between Pacey and Joey, the star-crossed lovers of Dawson's Creek, and will probably soon hear the same about Scout and Bella and Will Krudski.