Anyone instantly transported to a riverside pier by the lyric “So open up your morning light” will love Thea Glassman’s Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek: How Seven Teen Shows Transformed Television. “Today’s teen shows are leading the charge when it comes to progressive, diverse, and creative storytelling,” Glassman writes, however they wouldn’t exist with out the seven predecessors she covers in her spectacular debut: “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “My So-Called Life,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “The O.C.,” “Friday Night Lights” and “Glee.”
In a wealth of new interviews with creators, writers, actors, crew and extra insiders, Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek shares behind-the-scenes particulars that may delight devoted followers and excited newbies alike. While all of the reveals drew closely from their creators’ personal teenage years, Glassman factors out the distinctive decisions and approaches that made every iconic. For instance, “Fresh Prince” subverted typical sitcom format and “painted a nuanced picture of the Black experience. “My So-Called Life” impressed the primary on-line marketing campaign to avoid wasting a present, and “Dawson’s Creek” had the primary brazenly homosexual character within the teen sphere.
While Glassman acknowledges controversies that touched every present, she focuses on the creativity, coronary heart and exhausting work that led to a groundbreaking period of teen TV. After all, as author and pop-culture maven Jennifer Keishin Armstrong writes in her introduction, “There is no drama like teenage drama, in life and in fiction.”
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