Suburban Dreams THE AMERICAN TEENAGE EXPERIENCE IN NETFLIX ORIGINALS

Ablind Midwestern woman mysteriously returns home after a seven-year absence, having vanished as a teenager and reappeared with her faculties (and vision) strangely intact. In Massachusetts, a set of damaged adult siblings keep seeing visions of their dead mother; elsewhere, in an unspecified suburban milieu that might be located in the neighbouring state of New York,¹ a girl struggles with balancing her mortal existence and supernatural destiny as a half-witch. In small-town Indiana, a boy gets lost in an alternate dimension. And, in California, a high school senior gets expelled for spray-painting penises on teachers’ cars, and two Santa Clarita teens come to terms with living within close proximity of a recently inducted member of the undead.

These are just a few of the premises that anchor Netflix original shows – only a handful, in fact, of the around 1000 original programs that had been produced by the digital-subscription streaming giant as of the end of 2018. With over 85 per cent of its new spending going towards original content – an endeavour totalling roughly US$8 billion, according to chief content officer Ted Sarandos – Netflix grounds its current pursuit in ‘favorable economics […] and the expectation that big media companies would eventually put more weight into their own streaming-subscription services’.²

Especially considering that the millennial cohort – containing older students and pre-service teachers – makes up the majority of Netflix’s subscriber base, and that houses with teenagers subscribe to and watch Netflix with significantly more regularity,³ perhaps the time has come for teachers and other education stakeholders to consider the extent to which Netflix’s original content reflects the constituency of its pervasive viewership. After all, given that streaming services like Netflix continue to change viewers’ expectations about how and when and where and what to watch on television and other small screens, it would make sense that at least some of this original programming would seek to highlight, challenge or otherwise address the millennials and teenagers who spend so much time watching it. In addition to sheer entertainment, perhaps these shows can offer teachers valuable insights about the students who fill our classrooms on those wearying, cringe-worthy weekday mornings.

In this essay, we examine how six critically acclaimed and highly watched Netflix original series construct notions of adolescence and adolescent identity. Extending Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell’s notion that the figure of the teacher is assembled from cumulative cultural we argue that the figure of the teenager is composed and shaped in much the same way, drawing our attention to specific cultural texts that perhaps aid in this composition of adolescence (and adolescents). We recognise that, on the surface, some of these particular programs may have little, if anything, to do with teenagers, and perhaps even less to do with teachers and schools. Still, when viewed as allegories for the adolescent experience, each of these Netflix original series can inform our teaching practice in meaningful and productive ways. By critically engaging with the various complex – and oftentimes contradictory – social constructions of adolescence/ts, we can more productively and progressively navigate the equally complex and contradictory landscapes of our classrooms and learning spaces.