Hear It from the Boys
By James Poniewozik
A YEAR AFTER THE RATINGS SHOWED A drop-off in young male viewers of broadcast TV, it's not surprising to see three new shows about teenage boys. More surprising is what the boys are doing: wrestling with moral dilemmas, sorting out their ambitions, making sense of relationships.
Dude. How wussy.
The shows that feature the teen-boy class of 2004 have less to do with what young men will watch other young men do on TV (execute a 360? slam dunk, eat animal entrails, punk Justin Timberlake) than with how other people see teen boys. In CBS's Clubhouse (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.), 16-year-old Pete Young (Jeremy Sumpter) lands a dream after-school job: bat boy for the New York Empires baseball team. His single mom (Mare Winningham) wants him to focus on his studies, so he tells her he's spending late nights with his school's Scrabble club. But while doing an errand for a bad-seed player, he's caught with the cheater's steroids. Will he tell the truth or take the fall? Will Mom let him chase his diamond dream? Will he take Betty to the dance or stand her up for Veronica? O.K., I made up the last one, but boys in pop culture haven't had troubles this clean-cut (I mean, Scrabble club?) since before today's parents were teens. That's probably the point--parents may not care that the dialogue is dull and earnest or that the characters have the depth of a Topps trading card. Clubhouse is as wholesome as a cold glass of vitamin-D milk, and about as zesty.
If Clubhouse is a boy's parents' fantasy, then life as we know it (ABC, Thursdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is about a girl's parents' nightmare: three high school guys who care more about scoring with girls than on the infield. "They say boys think about sex every 15 seconds," says Ben (Jon Foster). "I think about it every five seconds." For life, this is the fundamental truth of teen boyhood--who can argue?--and the stories are all about sex, its pursuit and its complications. Handsome jock Dino (Sean Faris) has a girlfriend but can't get her to have sex with him. Awkward Jonathan (Chris Lowell) has a friend, Deborah (Kelly Osbourne), who's hot for him, but he's afraid his friends will make fun of him for dating her because she's overweight.
Life lurches from sweet and fresh to embarrassing and awful (much like adolescence). The story lines are bad teen-soap retreads--Ben has a fling with a teacher, and Dino catches his mother having an affair, both plots straight from Dawson's Creek Season 1. But its characters are much more believable--Dino, Ben and Jonathan aren't miniature adults, they're kids. When Dino finds his mom cheating, he's not just angry; he's scared, above all for his dad (D.B. Sweeney), a good-hearted sad sack who hates his pencil-pushing job. Fox's The O.C. transcended its soap roots with good writing and strong characters, including the adults; life isn't nearly as good yet, but it deserves a second date.
Finally, there's the teen boy as idealized by cable-political-news producers. The WB's Jack & Bobby (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.) follows two teen brothers: older, athletic Jack McAllister (Matt Long) and younger, asthmatic Bobby (Logan Lerman). Through a framing device--flash-forward excerpts from a political documentary--we learn that in 2040, Bobby will be elected President. But to get to the White House he must first overcome the smothering influence of his lefty professor mother Grace (Christine Lahti) and the stigma of being the biggest dork in his high school. Grace is idealistic but willful--really, she's the rebellious teen in the family, down to her pot smoking--and so Jack is forced to be the adult. Like The West Wing, with which it shares producer Thomas Schlamme, Jack & Bobby takes itself too seriously--the documentary interviews feel like Gravitas Helper. But it's also a smart, well-written show that constantly subverts our expectations, and it takes a rare demographic risk, reminding the WB's young viewers that cute teen boys, should they be so lucky, grow up to be paunchy old men.
Dude. What a bummer.