A lot of the television shows using fully adult actors in a high school setting could easily change their plot to revolve around a college setting instead of the weird fixation television has on displaying the sex lives of high schoolers

I think a good example of this is the show Riverdale. If you don’t know, it’s a show using the characters of Archie Comics in a teen murder drama ish show. In that show their lives are about whatever big mystery is going on, their relationships, and their friends. The characters in the show are all 16, but I feel like the show wouldn’t be changed a whole lot if they were 20 years older, in university, and the mystery aspects just be things related to the university rather than whatever random small town Archie Comics thing is happening. <br><br>Sort of another example is the show Stranger Things, except with this one I mainly bring up the female characters. That show is really more about the relationships between all the characters out of anything else and the girls do a lot. But they’re 12-16, which is sort of creepy, and I feel like giving them university lives would be a better display of how real adolescents deal with love and loosing people they care about rather than the fixation on displaying the sex lives of minors tv shows often have. I think this mainly boils down to the writer not wanting to have to do to do research for an entire university and the nuances of everything that follows having adutls in school. <br><br>So, why do I think media producers choose to do this instead of using college ages? I think the biggest thing is it’s easier to write off the sexuality of minors as “innocent” or “pure” where display of sex of people in their 20s is just seen as sex. I also think there’s a lot of a “holier than thou” aspect to presenting fictionally non-married sex of minors. Also in the plot of a lot of these shows, since they’re trying to pass off their characters as minors, a big chunk of the plot is basically the characters lie about their age to attend school and party with people their age, but we as viewers know they’re actually much older. This is a big no go for a show to do with characters in their 20s, so maybe that’s why the fiction is so focused on people pretending to be teenagers and having relationships and sex with people their age, rather than just displaying people their age doing that.