Teen Dramas are a captivating side of television that follows the lives of teens and their reckless behavior. Shows like 90210 Beverly Hills, Gossip Girl, Friday Night Lights, and The OC highlight the exciting lives of high school students. These shows, while spectacularly entertaining, are unrealistic for the lives of teens today. The idea of 17-year-olds being served at bars, attending red carpet events, and living a Hollywood lifestyle is wildly absurd.

Nevertheless, these shows all had four or more seasons. While high school can be drama-filled, with hormones on high and rumors spreading like wildfires, these shows make high school seem more like an Oscars Afterparty than a place for learning. As avid viewers of shows like these, we broke down the most significant plot holes in high school shows. 

Every day is jam-packed with more and more crazy events that make each day an adventure for the main characters in teen dramas. For example, some dramas show a clique of friends who hang out with each other every single day (including weekends), but that is very unrealistic in the world we live in today. Every single day, there is either a new student, a popular couple breaking up, or a bully punching the nerd. These unrealistic stereotypes occur in nearly every show that is based on high school students. 

These shows also depict an absurd amount of underage drinking. Teens casually walking into a bar and ordering a scotch is ridiculous because this is not usually how teens act today. Businesses are fully aware of the harm of serving minors, not only to the child but the threat of their company being shut down. While underage drinking is a problem, the fact that in the show Gossip Girl,  students were able to order an alcoholic beverage from the bar without getting carded is entirely fiction.

Teens are seen attending red carpet events after school with their tight-knit group of friends and are rarely seen doing homework. Each show focuses on a group of close friends that seemingly have every class together. In public schools, classes are randomly assigned, and the county offers a multitude of higher-level courses. This assumption that every person in the friend group will take the same level classes during the same period, manage their extracurriculars, as well as attend prestigious social gatherings is insanely unrealistic.

 A couple of popular teen dramas most watched today.

 As teens, the over-exaggeration of life and the societal expectations in these shows tend to get annoying. They create a fantasy life that most teens expect to live upon arriving at high school. These depictions could also damage the mental health of students who feel like they will not be successful unless they live up to the show’s expectations of how they should live their lives. Although these factors could get under our skin, the entertainment value is more important than the accurate portrayal of the real world.