3

All Teenagers Are Masters Of Disguising Their Age

Speaking of Glee (as I often and loudly do, until people beg me to stop), there was a bizarre plotline in Season 3 wherein a junior in high school lies about his age to get a job at a male strip club. Granted, he's played by a guy who was well into his 20s at the time, but in real life, strip club owners are going to take a minute to look into that before letting someone expose themselves at their business, right? I don't claim to be Professor Strip Club, but my first question when looking for a new hire would probably be "Is this illegal?"

20th Century Fox Television

2

Teens Are Totally Free Of Adult Supervision

If it were legal, my parents would have locked me in a basement and fed me nothing but circus peanuts until I turned 18. And honestly, they would have been doing both me and the rest of the world a favor. TV parents are totally cool with their kids just coming and going as they please, because they're totally cool and also totally absent from their children's lives. In teen shows, parents show up about as much as the mailman or a cashier at Wendy's.

The Pretty Little Liars are being stalked, and none of their parents ever say, "Hey, if you're going to go poking around that abandoned factory in the middle of the night, shoot me a text first or leave a note on the fridge." In order to remove the obstacle of lame parents parenting their cool teens, TV shows like to just remove parents altogether.

Have you ever noticed how many teenagers have their own apartment on TV? Bunheads, an otherwise-perfect show, had a 16-year-old character whose parents gave her an apartment rather than move her out of her hometown. "Here you go, child. Don't stick a knife in any sockets while we're gone forever," they must have said on their way out the door.

Then there's the ultimate cool TV teen move: being homeless. Jughead on Riverdale, Caleb on Pretty Little Liars, and even Jess for a time on Gilmore Girls were all homeless teens whose homelessness is treated as being honestly kind of cool. As if homelessness is a trait of your typical bad boys. It feels like someone took the "Cool kids don't have parents" thing just a little bit too far in these instances. As if they said, "We don't want any parents harshing their vibe. Take away the parents. In fact, take away the entire damn house. Screw it. He lives in a tent now. Chicks love tents."

1

Technology Doesn't Really Exist

Hey, remember 1982? Because whoever is writing these TV shows sure does. In fact, they don't remember anything but the time before technology was part of daily life. Yeah, everyone on these shows has cellphones (except when they need them to call the police because they're being chased by a murderer), but they don't really use them. Cellphones are just accessories that you put in their hands to make them Long Bangs With A Dark Past Barbie.

Teenagers today have laptops, video game consoles, and VR face hat things that let them swat around while other people sit bored in their living rooms. Technology is an ever-present part of their daily lives. How often do you see a group of kids in public and none of them are ignoring their friends in favor of a YouTube video of a kid snorting Flamin' Hot Cheetos? Legend has it that it's impossible for modern teenagers to make direct eye contact with anything but a game of Candy Crush. And to give you an idea of how fast that technology moves, even that reference is dated.

Yet on these shows, there are so many instances of people getting together to discuss information that should've been conveyed in a group text. The Pretty Little Liars talk about a bunch of illegal stuff like breaking and entering, stalking, and sometimes murder in their local coffee shop. Have these people never heard of the knife or running man emojis? It's the only way to safely plot murder with shapes. They can't arrest you for shapes.

Technology is present on TV today, but only in the same way that it was in the '80s. On Awkward, an MTV show about being awkward, they constantly call each other on their phones to ask to meet in person for an interaction that would probably actually take place entirely over the phone or internet in real life.

It's more fun to watch them interact with each other in person, so they call each other and say, "Hey, come over. We need to talk" instead of just ... you know, continuing to talk or type to each other. To be fair, I may have just noticed this one because I'm allergic to face-to-face human contact and prefer to communicate with most of my friends through a complicated maritime flag system.

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