Short answer: No.
Long answer: Only by changing everything.
High school doesn’t last forever.
Credit: Everett Collection (2)
The setting is a world that has to end.
In real life, kids go to college, or get jobs, or generally just stop being kids.
For TV producers, that’s a tense evolution and maybe a breaking point.
How do you keep a show running smoothly when basic narrative logic demands everything has to change?
Nothing aboutGossip Girlmade sense after season 2, and the nonsense stopped being fun after season 3.
What happens when young adulthood pushes them apart?
Pennbrook University welcomed the entire cast ofBoy Meets World.
It’s an obvious fix everyone at the same high school goes to the same college!
with less obvious problems.
If graduation is a moment of radical transformation, college requiresconstanttransformation.
There are few species of fandom more passionate than the love-mobs who adore teen TV.
But doesanyteen TV fan, like, get excited about their favorite characters going to college?
There are narrative alternatives for TV producers looking to maintain their show’s dramatic layout.
Time jumps are never a bad idea.
And at this point,One Tree Hillis probablymorediscussed for the adult years' killer-nanny-in-the-cornfield excess.
You hit a big pitfall, though, if your goal is anything but insanity.
Characters move forward in time, but wind up frozen in the same dynamic.
The people they hung out with in high school become the people they hang with through their 20s.
There’s a natural urge to keep a central ensemble of 5-11 characters together.
But when people get older, they have to grow at least alittleapart.
The best solution is also the most impossible.
And I don’t think any teen TV show staged a better evolution thanFriday Night Lights.
Some older characters returned occasionally for very casual hellos; most of them, believably, did not.
Almost all the high school sweethearts broke up, immediately.
Her arc helpfully incarnates every wrong turn a teen TV show can make in one single person.
Television has evolved in many ways, but I worry the Graduation Problem will only get worse.
Streamers and premium cable networks air their 10-episode seasons sparingly.
IfNever Have I Evermaintains its current calendar, it’ll produce maybe 40 episodes in four years.
(I worry forEuphoria, which will wind up with more than two years between proper seasons.)
Instead, season 4 took an unexpected left turn into lighthearted comedy.
Summer went to college just long enough to visit home constantly and then get expelled.
All the other teens just kinda became twenty-somethings ahead of schedule.
Everything became much goofier; even an apocalyptic earthquake was an opportunity for mother-daughter karaoke.
Instead,The O.C.got cancelled.
Read more fromI Want My Teen TV, EW’s summerlong celebration of teen shows past and present.
