In Search of the Great College Drama

It seems an obvious question: How come no good television shows have been made about the American college experience? Tonight, NBC debuts Community, a hitherto critically regarded comedy about a diverse group of community college students—few of whom are actually of college age. By my count, it’s the third major television show set at a college, and the other two are Felicity and Undeclared, so you know how loosely I’m using “major.”*

*It’s very possible I’ve forgotten another show, but believe me, I thought about it for a long time.

While the college landscape has been neglected, there has been nothing short of a plethora of high school dramas. Beverly Hills 90210 appears to have started the trend, with shows such as Dawson’s Creek, Freaks and Geeks, Gilmore Girls, The O.C., One Tree Hill, Friday Night Lights, Veronica Mars, and Gossip Girl following suit. On the other end of the spectrum, there have been a number of comedies about 20-something singles, most notably Friends and How I Met Your Mother.

What is perhaps most confounding is the fear shown by high school programs toward the college setting. Ever since Saved by the Bell: The College Years bombed—for very non-collegiate reasons—very few high school shows even attempt to make the college leap. Degrassi starts following a new class of high schoolers (who get less attractive each season, both physically and as characters) with brief look-ins on its alums in college that rarely touch on college life.* Friday Night Lights explicitly changed the classes of several of its characters. The O.C. ended. One Tree Hill fast-forwarded four years. College is so repulsive that writers will do anything to avoid it, from invalidating previously established facts about its characters to changing which characters they follow altogether.

*Degrassi did do more of this in its most recent season when Emma and Manny—inarguably the show’s main characters—roomed together at college. Still, their storyline became, at best, tertiary to the show.**

**The show’s made-for-television movie, Degrassi Goes Hollywood, seems to have been motivated in part by a desire to show the older, college-aged characters in their new lives, which have not so surprisingly taken them away from college.

But why does this fear exist among television writers? Surely they don’t attribute the failure of SBTB: TCY to the fact that the action takes place at a college, and not more important factors like a Saturday morning kid’s show moved to primetime or its new theme song sucked or Bob Golic was prominently involved. What makes high school the most appealing setting for the angst that accompanies maturation?*

*It’s not just the ease of making a high school show. It’s not like the actors playing high schoolers aren’t actually in college, or that the sets are simpler (just look at the PCA “campus” in Zoey 101). The ease of making a HS drama basically boils down to an adherence to a well-known formula, known in other words as intellectual laziness.

High school dramas exploit the, well, drama of high school: the crushes, the first times, the freedom, the pangs of growing up. Most high school dramas center on one or two main romantic relationships, the best being Cory and Topanga’s from Boy Meets World.* What drives the drama, the tension, the conflict—whatever you want to call it—in these shows is the sense of permanence, the idea that what happens now greatly influences what happens later.

*I know Boy Meets World is a half-hour show and probably more a comedy than a drama, but I mean, did you SEE when Topanga moved to Pittsburgh? Comedies aren’t supposed to make you bawl.

But that’s not true anymore. For those of us born after, say, 1975, high school is no longer the setting of our youth’s defining moments. College has replaced high school as the place where we grow up, where we learn to live on our own, where we make bigger and more significant mistakes, where we meet the people we spend the rest of our lives with. It’s college and not high school that is now the stereotypical “best four years of your life.” And the drama of high school is only dramatic to us in the present tense; in retrospect, it’s almost laughable how seriously we took matters such as a final exam or the wooing of a girl we’d consider leaving once we spotted the first hot one on campus (because you should never underestimate the attraction of proximity). High school was the it time for our parents’ generation, but it isn’t for ours. We get jobs later, we marry later; in essence, we grow up later. And college almost represents a clean slate, a chance to atone for how we lived our high school lives and to either remake or solidify the person we want to be.

The best television dramas are comprehensive, non-formulaic, and risk-taking.* They are character studies that focus on development (see: the increasingly extensive use of flashbacks in dramas such as Lost, Mad Men, and Dexter) and self-esteem: Why isn’t Tony Soprano happy with who he is, and how did he become that person anyway? As a result, one would think that, amidst the multitude of procedurals (both police and legal), teen dramas, relationship comedies, and the just-in-general muck of current television programming, someone would take a chance at staging the college experience in America.**

*I acknowledge that I purposely chose three adjectives that describe The Wire.

**Imagine a drama that commences at orientation, where the viewer is immediately thrust into the same mindset as all the characters; that is, he sees a horde of unknown and consequently intimidating individuals. The storyline follows the relationships that ensue, including the false starts, the inaccurate opening impressions, and each student’s capricious hold on who they want to be. Flashbacks are employed—if not as liberally as in Lost—to cover, in due time, the necessary details of the characters’ pasts. Characters can fade in and out, and by the end, the show’s core has dwindled to a select few, who continue their friendships on into their twenties and potentially beyond. You’re telling me you wouldn’t be somewhat intrigued by this? At least as intrigued as you are by another drama sympathetic toward vampires, right?

College is a complex place—far more so than high school.* College confronts us with far greater challenges to our perceptions of both self and others. There is no sanctuary at college, complete with moral platitudes at the dinner table or the family-room sofa. The consequences of our decisions are real, and the burden of our future weighs a little more heavily on our shoulders. The relationships my generation forges in college are becoming more substantive and more permanent than the ones from high school; the days of marrying the “high school sweetheart” seem numbered.

*IMHO.

And aren’t these precisely the elements that constitute quality television drama?*

*And this doesn’t even begin to tap into the comedic potential of a college-set sitcom—some of which will hopefully be on display in Community.

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