Teen TV Migrates to Streaming While Shows Embrace Diversity to Talk to Gen Z

Networks like the CW, Freeform and Fox were once a treasure trove of teen TV, with slates packed with series like “The O.C.,” “Gossip Girl,” “Pretty Little Liars” and “90210.” But as younger audiences completely shun linear, these networks have largely abandoned teen programming. 

Ratings for the CW and Freeform, two networks that used to be teen-centric, dropped 30% and 22%, respectively, from 2022 to 2023.

Today streaming is a haven for YA programs viewers once found on network TV. Prime Video tested the waters with series like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” while Netflix produced young audience movies like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Now both streamers have bolstered their teen slates with Prime Video’s recent reboot of ‘90s cult classic “Cruel Intentions” and Netflix’s series “My Life With the Walter Boys,” “Heartstopper,” “Sex Education,” “XO Kitty” and “Ginny and Georgia.” 

Max also joined the fray with a focus on reboots of teen classics “Gossip Girl” and “Pretty Little Liars” (though they have since been canceled), alongside the college-set Mindy Kaling comedy series “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” Hulu has countered with steamy college series “Tell Me Lies,” which was just renewed for a third season.

“It really is about adapting or dying,” media studies scholar and “Teen TV” author Stefania Marghitu told TheWrap. “Whether that’s adapting to the Marvellification of everything, of fantasy worlds, of new genres, but also of adhering to what this next generation really wants to see in that programming, whether that’s diversity, speaking to things like mental health, sexuality, sex identity — we really started to see a marketed shift in that.”

While traditional TV networks long dominated the creation of soapy dramas centered around the sordid lives of teenagers, the shift to streaming means that Amazon, Netflix and their streaming competitors are the new tastemakers for young adult audiences. Without the pressure to immediately capture impressive ratings, the teen television shift to streaming has opened doors for producers to craft YA-driven content outside of the typical confines that teen shows found on linear, in terms of format and content — all with both Gen Z and older audiences who might watch the show in mind.

The move to streaming has also resulted in a more diverse range of teen programming, allowing shows that may have been considered too niche for linear to flourish on streaming platforms in search of heavily engaged subscribers. Still, there’s only so much YA content in which streamers are willing to invest as they balance that programming with shows more reminiscent of ensemble dramas like “The O.C.” or “Dawson’s Creek,” leading to early cancellations of reboots like Max’s “Gossip Girl” and the “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin.”

That doesn’t mean soapy ensemble dramas can’t exist, though they might be harder to greenlight. “Cruel Intentions” co-showrunner Sara Goodman, who worked as a producer on the original “Gossip Girl,” (2007-12) noted she and co-showrunner Phoebe Fisher had to fight while the show was in development not to include a murder mystery in the series, and instead keep the show’s focus on the messy relationships at the heart of the story. 

The teen television industry is “changing so quickly and then reversing itself,” Goodman said. “Tell Me Lies” similarly revolved around a murder mystery for its first season, but after fans responded more to supporting characters the feedback allowed the show’s creators “not to worry about needing to have any kind of bigger mystery, or have another dead body” for Season 2, showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer told TheWrap.

What changed?

While streaming has been a formidable threat and reason for linear decline for the past decade —  Nielsen’s gauge report for November attributed 48.7% of TV usage to linear and cable compared to 41.6% on streaming — Alloy Entertainment CEO Leslie Morgenstein, whose company has produced the O.G. “Gossip Girl” and “Pretty Little Liars” series, said the genre’s shift to streaming “hit home” when Nexstar Media Group acquired a 75% stake in CW in 2022 from co-owners Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global. 

“Their programming had evolved from ‘Gossip Girl’ really being the…foundational series of that network to being much more the DC network,” Morgenstein told TheWrap, referencing shows like  “Supergirl,” “Smallville,” “The Flash” and “Arrow,” which he noted were “soapy as well,” but “certainly was reaching a somewhat different audience” than their predecessors. While the DC series swapped places with shows like “The Vampire Diaries,” “Jane the Virgin” and “The Carrie Diaries” to dominate the CW’s lineup, that era of the CW has all but ended with the series finale of “Superman & Lois.”

As the CW enters 2025, “All American” is the only teen-centric series still standing. The network is trying its hand at imported and acquired content, sports and live events as it debuts a new detective series,” Good Cop/Bad Cop,” led by former “Gossip Girl” star Leighton Meester. 

Freeform, on the other hand, crafted its own pivot when longrunning favorites like “Good Trouble” and “grown-ish” came to an end in 2024. It has stacked its slate with unscripted series, including a new season of “Project Runway” premiering in 2025, to target their highly-female demographic.

“We deeply miss the CW and Freeform being homes, and I think that’s just reflective of their businesses,” Morgenstein said. “It’s the reality of younger viewers moving away from traditional TV and watching on their phones and spending a lot of time on Tiktok and YouTube.”

Representatives for Freeform and the CW declined to comment on this story.

Opening doors for new, niche content

While 2000s staples stuck to their tried and true format of following a group of dramatic teens — whether on the streets of the Upper East Side or a small Northeastern town — streaming opened the doors for fresh takes on coming-of-age stories for more niche audiences.

Take British coming-of-age series “Heartstopper,” which centers on the love story between two teenage boys (one of whom is in the closet), whose first two seasons scored 4.9 million views during the first half of 2024 prior to Season 3’s release, according to Netflix’s semi-annual engagement report. Though “Heartstopper” brought in less than half of the viewership of “Ginny & Georgia,” a more traditional teen drama whose first two seasons brought in 13.7 million views, “Heartstopper” gained critical acclaim for its LGBTQ-focused storylines and representation and blew up on social media. Series creator Alice Oseman told TheWrap earlier this year that “Heartstopper” would come to an end in a potential Season 4, but Netflix has yet to decide on its future.

Likewise, Netflix’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” spinoff series “XO, Kitty,” which follows Lara Jean’s younger sister as she embarks on a new journey at a Seoul, South Korea, boarding school, scored 7 million views in the first half of 2024, bringing in about half of the 15.3 million views for megahit “Wednesday,” though “XO, Kitty” received a swift renewal and is preparing to debut its second season in January.

“Niche-casting definitely came from that shift from the network era to the post-network era,” Marghitu said, pointing to beloved network shows like “My So-Called Life” (ABC) and “Freaks and Geeks” (NBC) that “definitely would have fit in on streaming” but failed to score Season 2 renewals at the time. “In streaming, things did get a lot more niche too, and also a lot more global,” she said. “Even early Netflix was competing with a lot of niche-casting cable places like HBO.”

Marghitu also noted that these niche series likely have smaller budgets and work to appeal to a global audience, especially for U.K.-based productions “Heartstopper” and “Sex Education,” which ran for four seasons on Netflix.

On streaming, teen TV shows can experiment with longer or shorter running times for episodes instead of playing to specific timeslots. And that flexibility for episodic length poses a welcome challenge. Production companies can pursue different episodic formats or ditch TV altogether and opt for a streaming movie.

“We have the freedom to format our stories in the way that we think best fits the story,” said iGeneration Studios CEO Ed Glauser, whose company has produced Netflix’s “My Life With the Walter Boys” and “The Kissing Booth” movie trilogy.  “It’s great that we can choose how we want to format it and still be working with the same company … It’s a much looser, freer form of formatting, which I know our writers love.”

But teen shows haven’t only ever been watched exclusively by teens, and shows that provide fare for teens and adults alike — like the younger love triangle and adult relationships in “My Life With the Walter Boys” — fit well with a streamer like Netflix, which hopes to appeal to a broad subscriber base. 

Morgenstein noted that broadening the audience via streaming has encouraged Alloy to build shows for adults that still retain the production company’s DNA, pointing to Netflix’s “You,” which centers on a male antagonist in his 30s but appeals to teens and younger demographics with its star, “Gossip Girl” alum Penn Badgley.

The likely future: streaming reboots of linear favorites and new delights

It was the lack of soapy teen dramas that inspired Goodman to helm a reimagined “Cruel Intentions,” which found its home at Prime Video with Goodman serving as co-showrunner with Phoebe Fisher after the title had been in development with IMDb TV and NBC.

With many shows in the streaming era being mandated to have a big twist, supernatural element or murder mystery to it, Goodman noted she had to fight back to keep her reboot’s focus on characters and their messy relationships. 

Other streaming reboots in the genre include “One Tree Hill” and “Friday Night Lights,” which are in early development at Netflix and Peacock, respectively.

“Remakes, spin-offs are the name of the game in all television, but it becomes really significant in something like teen TV, which is known for its tropes … [and] archetypes of characters,” Marghitu said. The upcoming “Friday Night Lights” series will draw on viewers who watched the show’s first run, as well as younger viewers who found it later on Netflix. “Everything is a reference to something else from the past, and a nod to those previous teen programming [and] those teen tropes,” she said.”

Marghitu cautioned that “discerning teens” can spot a “money-grab” if reboots don’t feel authentic, referencing the 2011 MTV remake of U.K. hit “Skins” or the later seasons of CW tentpole “Riverdale.”

“We don’t know what models are going to develop,” Morgenstein said. “There certainly is a big movement right now, across the board, streamers included, back to advertiser-supported content, so does that create openings for linear? Maybe.” Younger audiences are less discerning about where the content lives. “If there’s a show they want to watch, if it’s on linear, or if it’s on a streamer, they’re going to find it.”

And a recent shift in Gen Z’s viewing habits shows that those viewers seem to be more open to network-friendly formats, with mockumentary sitcom “Abbott Elementary” scoring a massive hit for ABC (and Hulu, where new episodes stream the next day).

“[Gen Z] quite likes comedy again. They like sitcom.They like the ensemble,” Marghitu said. “It’s less about the prestige drama series, so even if they like ‘Euphoria,’ they like the warmness of comedy programming or lighter programming as well.”

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