Teen Drama Links for August 20, 2024

Aug 20, 2024

Leave it to a review of It Ends With Us to remind me of how the teen drama genre is unfairly maligned.

Writing for Variety, film critic Owen Gleiberman makes the case that the film is a soap opera — and that that’s not a bad thing.

“‘Soap opera’ is a term that conjures cliché images. In hindsight it’s a rather sexist phrase, like the studio-system category of ‘women’s pictures.’ Soap operas have always dealt, at times in depth, with women’s experiences. When the phrase came into vogue, in the 1960s, soap operas were what housewives watched on network television in the afternoon (I’d watch my mother get absorbed into them). One of the many ways that they were unfairly sneered at is that the culture gave no credibility to the fact that soap operas were a serial form, which allowed them to slip into the nuances of a dramatic situation. Sure, they featured broad acting and a certain mannequin-model handsomeness and beauty, yet they gripped people — mostly women — because there was something vital and alive in them.
‘It Ends with Us’ is an overripe saga of love and romance that’d also about some very serious dark things. But when I say it’s a soap opera, I mean that as praise. Based on Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel (the script is by Christy Hall) and directed by Justin Baldoni (who is one of the film’s costars), it’s an avid and emotional movie that pulls you right along. If you go in not knowing what it’s about, and are therefore all the more surprised by where it goes, it may be even more effective. That’s true of most movies, but in a soap opera the plot is all — the twists you didn’t see coming, the ones that reveal life to be an improvised drama of fate.”

Gleiberman later concludes:

“There are more twists, including one that left an audience member at the screening I attended going ‘Noooooo!’ (which kind of spoke for everyone there). Not because she didn’t believe it, but because she did. That’s what good soap opera does: It heightens the twists that life will throw at you. And in the case of ‘It Ends with Us,’ it gives Blake Lively the chance to play a woman who tries to make the right choice, but has to wake up from the dream she’s been living in — maybe her whole life — to do it. By the end, we’re watching a different movie than the one we thought we were. But it’s still a love story, just one about learning to love yourself.”

That’s what good soap opera does: It heightens the twists that life will throw at you.

Like soap operas, so often the criticism of teen dramas is about how heightened they are. (I admittedly felt that way myself when “Gossip Girl,” starring Lively, first premiered.) And just like Gleiberman writes that “‘soap opera’ is a term that conjures cliché images,” so does “teen drama.” In fact, his description of how the soap opera genre is smeared when it actually has merits could be used word for word to describe the teen drama genre as well.

I’ve already written at length about how the teen dramas aren’t taken seriously. Neither are soap operas. It Ends With Us is arguably both given its two timelines (not unlike Challengers in that way). When people dismiss television shows or movies as teen dramas or soap operas, it makes me think they don’t really understand those genres at all. If they did, they wouldn’t be using such descriptors dismissively at all.