Teen TV

Teen TV presents the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience and the ways that television has at times embraced youth subcultures. Focusing on the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming of age story, the prevalent genres of teen TV - soap opera, sitcom and reality show - and milestones faced by teen characters like sex, bullying, partying, depression and coming out, Ellen Seiter and Stefania Marghitu compare episodes across some of the best and most popular teen series of the last sixty years. Case studies include interviews with directors to discuss the particular challeneges of creating teen series for network television including Freaks and Geeks' Paul Feig and Malcom in the Middle's Ken Kwapis. Other shows discussed include Gossip Girl, Skins, Degrassi, Friday Night Lights, Growing Pains and more.

Ellen Seiter holds the Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she teaches courses on television and new media history, theory and criticism in the Cinema and Media Studies Division. She has written about youth and media for 25 years, lecturing on the topic in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong and the UK, and at universities and conferences throughout the United States. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children’s Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993) Remote Control; Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989), and The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production (co-author Bill Seiter (Yale, 2012). She has survived parenting three teenagers of her own, Anne, Henry and Joe Metcalf.

Stefania Marghitu is a PhD student with the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts Division of Cinema and Media Studies. Her primary interests deal with critical and cultural studies of television, the showrunner and modes of authorship, feminist media studies, and production studies. Her dissertation project is titled The Showrunner: Authorship, Agency and Identity in American Television. You can find her work published in The Spectator, Gender Forum, Flow TV, Critical Studies in Television Online and the edited collection ReFocus on Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press). She has presented talks at conferences such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Console-ing Passions, and Making Television in the 21st Century in the US, UK and Denmark.