I’ve always preferred watching representations of milestones onscreen to actually experiencing them firsthand. (I know, I know: big weird-only-child energy.) When I was, um, not exactly “crushing it” socially in high school, it was something of a balm to consume the endless stream of TV shows that perfectly depicted adolescent angst—from My So-Called Life to The O.C. to my personal favorite, Freaks and Geeks—and know that I wasn’t alone in feeling ever-so-slightly out of place, because Seth Cohen and Angela Chase and Lindsay Weir were right there with me.
By the time I started college, however, I was less of a shy, wallflower-ish observer and more of an actual, fully realized person taking up space on campus and doing typical idiotic, college-kid things (such as stealing “WELCOME” signs from the outside of fraternities whose members annoyed me and spending hours watching YouTube tutorials about making your own apple bong). One strange aspect of my college experience, though, was that I could never seem to find it mirrored onscreen. I’d devoured Undeclared—the college-set Judd Apatow series that followed Freaks and Geeks—with gusto, but aside from Buffy’s sporadic attendance at “UC Sunnydale” and Felicity’s historically tragic haircut, there just wasn’t much else out there that depicted college the way I experienced it.
Granted, my college experience wasn’t necessarily “typical”: I went to Kenyon, a small, private liberal-arts college in the middle of Ohio where classes like “Meanings of Death” and “Good Nukes, Bad Nukes” lined the course catalog. Our sports teams more or less sucked (except for…swimming? And maybe some other lesbian-coded women’s sports I’m forgetting?), and our sole off-campus entertainment option consisted of getting extremely mid Midwestern fajitas at a suspiciously cheap Mexican restaurant and then trawling the aisles of Goodwill for used Doc Martens and floaty ’90s-goth witch dresses that we hoped would make us look like Courtney Love. In other words, attending Kenyon wasn’t exactly the all-American college experience, but given that I wasn’t exactly the all-American teenager I’d spent most of high school wishing I could magically become, it was a strangely perfect fit.
The first time I saw a TV representation of college that felt akin to mine was in 2021, when Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble’s series The Sex Lives of College Girls—which returned for its third, tragically Renee Rapp-less season this week—premiered on Max. Essex, the fictional school that the show’s four protagonists attend, is probably more akin to Williams or even Kaling’s alma mater, Dartmouth, than it is to Kenyon, but I recognized so many of the show’s painfully awkward, inexplicably fun details from my own college years, from teeth-achingly awkward first-year ice cream social mixers to dishwater-dull on-campus jobs to Monday-morning run-ins with the stranger you shared what we used to call a “DFMO” (dance-floor make-out) with on Saturday. I couldn’t be more excited for SLOCG‘s return, but the brilliance of that one particular show still can’t make up for the many tired representations of young adulthood that the TV powers that be have served up to us over the years. (I mean, really, do we strictly need more jokes about young people today and their green hair and pronouns that were likely written by a room of white men in their 40s?)
