As you guys know, as much as I love the many assorted teen dramas on ABC Family — Make It Or Break It! Pretty Little Liars! — I can not even deal with Secret Life, starring this girl:
I follow it only by watching the three minutes of it that end up on the tail end of my DVRed Make It Or Break It, and every single week, those three minutes are people looking super serious and having conversations like:
“I think we should have sex.”
“You want to have sex?”
“Sex is an important part of a committed relationship! I read that in a book about intimacy.”
“We can be intimate without sex. Sex is a big deal. I don’t want you to have sex if you’re not ready to have sex.”
“Sex sex sex sex sex sex sex?”
“Sexy sex sex sex AND THEN SOMEONE WILL DIE.”
Like, okay: I was a teenager once. And teenagers think about sex a lot! But they ALSO think about OTHER things, like whether they’re going to fail math and that huge fight they just had with their best friend. It makes me CRAZY that those three minutes of the show that I watch every week are, without fail, kids talking stiltedly about sex in a way that no one ever talks about sex, and not ever about any of the other dramatic possibilities inherent for a teen drama. Like, HELLO, couldn’t SOMEONE on that show be a secret cutter, have an eating disorder, be stealing exams, be secretly homeless, find themselves inadvertently dating a bigot, have a brain tumor, have a stalker, catch amnesia, get addicted to Adderall, or fall in love with a hologram? THERE ARE SO MANY OTHER OPTIONS FOR DRAMZ.
Just as there are other options for Shailene Woodley here, in terms of wardrobe. She looks like the cool ceramics teacher at your high school who is always drinking out of a lopsided coffee mug and who drives a Le Car. Which is awesome and totally apt if you ARE a cool ceramics teacher with a Le Car, but kind of weird when you are a wee teen starlet.
