Life on the edge: accurate issues of TV series for teenagers

Abstract

The object of the research is series for teenagers as a special kind of artistic and educational content, which raises serious personal and social problems through entertainment. Such series as 13 Reasons Why (USA, 2017), Early Swallows (Ukraine, 2019), Stay Cool (Poland, 2022), and Red Rose (UK, 2023) served as material for the research. They are devoted to the issues of teenagers’ suicide or death, bullying, etc. These series are united by the circles of issues they concern, which provides a possibility to analyze similarity of the methods, characters, and conflicts while solving these problems. Moreover, studying the reaction to this content allows stating the availability of an intensive reaction of society, specifying the influence of the series for teenagers on the behavior of the latter in the real life and in social networks. The purpose of the research was to determine special media narratives, and analyze the characters’ specifics in series reflecting the teenagers’ problems as complicated psychological and social ones. Deep content analysis as well as comparative and narrative analyses were performed to implement this purpose. The research results prove that taking into account special requests of the target audience of this content, the problems, the plot points, images of the characters, etc., are determined in a special way. Some problems exposed in the series for teenagers shock the adult audience and cause an intense media reaction. For example, after the series 13 Reasons Why, the media wrote about the increased amount of requests for suicide in the Google search engine, and discussed an issue concerning harm or benefit from raising such painful issues in this format. In general, film content is quite a powerful tool of influence on social consciousness, especially on viewers of such an age that specifies a need to analyze the images, narratives, and problems of youth films. In particular, in our research, we aim at showing that certain social problems in the series hide even more serious ones that concern every teenager, as well as parents of teenagers. That is why the topicality of this content is indisputable.