Growing Pains: The Struggle to Make Gen Z Must-See TV Show | American television

TIn its year, despite not particularly liking or liking the show, I thought a lot about the opening scene of Adults. FX’s half-hour comedy about a group of recent college graduates in New York begins, naturally, on the subway; What seems like an overly studied portrait of early adulthood intimacy — tangled limbs, in-group references, aggressively laid-back banter — quickly turns into a showdown between a creepy subway masturbator and the group’s instigator, Issa (Amita Rao), who tries to out-masturbate him to make an unruly point about feminism. “Is this the world you want?!?” She shouted at him as she pulled her pants on tight.

This moment was intentionally upsetting, perhaps too much – I’m as prepared for a surprise as anyone, but I found the difficulty of this shock unforgettably upsetting. However, it also unintentionally reveals: This, he implicitly shouts, is a show Attract the attention of young people. A similar anxiety runs through the opening of I Love LA, HBO’s West Coast throwback for adults that similarly plays as a zeitgeist take on the sexy chaos of adulthood. We meet Maya, played by creator and co-writer Rachel Sinnott, having sex with her boyfriend, determined to come before going to work, even if it means ignoring the earthquake.

Both scenes contain many of the hallmarks of television about the wilderness of one’s twenties — intense relationships, staggering narcissism, narrow-minded optimism, intoxicating chaos — though watching them, and many of the scenes that followed, I don’t remember the turmoil of that era as much as I remember the television industry in general. Television is desperate to connect with young people, who are increasingly choosing YouTube or social media for screen time. Maybe that’s why the industry seems particularly optimistic on I Love LA, in a way that’s at odds with a show that still feels like a work in progress. Even before it aired, Variety declared the series a “generational text” and put Sinnott, the former “It Girl” internet comedian turned budding screen star, on its cover; HBO has already announced a renewal for a second season, calling it “among the fastest-growing original comedies,” averaging 2 million viewers — a big number for prestige cable, though by no means generation-defining.

All of this belies a strange phenomenon in Hollywood: young people still dominate the culture, just not on television. Generation Z, generally defined as those born between 1997 and 2010, are the second-largest demographic in the United States after Millennials, and they are important to the future of television. However, the market for any series, let alone a great one, about being a single guy and hanging out with your friends, is almost wide open. Previous generations had broad network sitcoms like Living Single, New Girl, Happy Endings, How I Met Your Mother, and The Big Bang Theory; HBO entries with prestigious creative stars like Lena Dunham’s Girls and Issa Rae’s Insecure; And popular movies like Comedy Central’s Broad City, TBS’s Search Party, and Freeform’s The Bold Type. Gen Z has duds like Generation, an attempt at a one-man show for teens on HBO in 2021, or the smaller networks’ latest round of attempts to speak to 20-somethings — I Love LA, Adults and Overcompensating, a college series from internet comedian Benito Skinner for Prime Video, which were all renewed for a second season to modest fanfare.

What was once an essential component of the television buffet – television that reflects the reality of youth, their anxieties, fantasies and plans – is now a small subsection, neither attracting attention nor tasting properly. The closest it comes to defining Generation Z is Euphoria, the overwrought HBO series about high school students that reads as a millennial fever dream of all the ways the Internet can subvert adolescence, even though it has fertilized a distinctly sexual aesthetic, popularized some bizarrely imitable fashions, and launched several movie star careers. It has also been off the air for five years, with its long-awaited third season, which includes a time jump to post-college life, postponed until the spring of 2026.

Meanwhile, Gen Z friends seem to be friends themselves. According to viewing data from Nielsen, when Gen Z picks a show to watch, they tend to go back in time — 65% of the shows 16-34 year olds watch are so-called library series, including the typical NBC sitcom (10.63 billion minutes watched in 2024), the Gilmore Girls series (11.6 billion) and the medical soap Grey’s Anatomy. (17.37 billion). Nearly half of Gen Z prefer YouTube or social video platforms like TikTok over traditional TV or pay streaming, a harbinger of what Vox’s Rebecca Jennings calls the MrBeastification of entertainment. Much of the online group has taken to rewatching Girls, reading the series closely as a rich archival text about the quest of fickle millennials.

But in order to reflect their own experience, many of the same group are turning to social media — to see peers posting about their dating experiences or laugh-worthy stories online, to watch influencers enjoying fun and flirty nights with friends, or, in the case of comedians Kyle Chase and Veronica Slowikowska’s long-running TikTok series, to tune into the latest lore-filled chapter about a roommate situation that may or may not be real. (SNL, also looking to attract younger viewers, smartly tapped Slowikowska for its current season.)

Hollywood is trying to meet an audience increasingly accustomed to bite-sized content, paying companies to chop up their series into bite-sized chapters for social media; Hollywood Trade The Ankler reported that one of the producers of “Adults” paid the company $15,000 to post 2,500 videos from the series on social media as experiential marketing. (The scheme has reportedly racked up 40 million views across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.) Studios like Fox Entertainment and Miramax are investing millions in vertical video companies, part of a “microdrama” gold rush that attempts to capture the divided attention of young people via compact narratives told in two-minute “episodes” that are easily accessible on social media.

But once you reach an audience, you still need to connect with them, and TV, no matter how loopy TikTok is, is in a tough bind: There’s no way TV, even with its accelerated production and release schedules relative to film, can hope to keep up with the trends of lightning speed and social media savviness, or provide a model for the speed, hyper-referentiality, and clearly unflattering aesthetic of internet comedy. It’s very difficult for film and television to capture the seamless presence of the Internet in our lives or our sprawling online selves, let alone the economy of its creators, in a way that doesn’t seem distracting, deadly, or cheap. As Jeff Astrov, 59, an alumnus of the Friends Writers’ Room, told The Ankler, if the hit NBC series came out now, “Chandler would be on his phone the entire episode.”

But they have to try, to have an appearance of accuracy for the generation they portray. Both “I Love Los Angeles” and “Adulting” attempt to build online lives into the fabric of their characters’ social groups — the former focusing on Maya’s career managing her influential best friend Tallulah, while the latter features side plots like tagging a roommate’s crush out of thin air. Results are expected to be mixed. In I Love Los Angeles, the satire of influencers is too toothless, and Talallah’s actual work as an influencer is too ambiguous; Adults fare better, but still deal with the hassles of online dating and location sharing with what look like oven mitts.

I have to say that, like many aimless twenty-somethings, both series look promising; The second half of both new seasons is much better than the first half. But watching them mostly left me nostalgic for the intriguing insights of Girls, the resonant friendship battles of Insecure, or the worn-out comfort of Friends — which show that feeling connected to some nebulous, shared experience of growing up and figuring it out. Perhaps traditional television, which is moving from a dominant cultural art form to a niche medium, will do so as well.