Call it, The Summer I Turned Popular.
A new study helps explain the explosion in popularity of shows like Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. The annual Teens & Screens survey of 1,500 adolescents from UCLA‘s Center for Scholars & Storytellers shows a sea change in the type of content favored by viewers between the ages 10 and 24 year old.
In 2024, the most popular genre of content with adolescents was fantasy, at 36.2%. Those looking for relatable content featuring “people like me” made up only 24.2% of the respondents. This year, however, those preferences have virtually flipped, with 32.7% of adolescents saying they prefer relatable content — a 35.3% jump over last year — and just 25% going for fantasy.
The results confirm what the folks at Prime Video experienced when S3 of TSITP amassed 70M viewers globally in its first 70 days, a 65% jump from S2 over the same time frame. The streamer’s also done well with We Were Liars, Motorheads, Maxton Hall and Overcompensating.
What’s behind this growing popularity?
“A through-line at the heart of these findings is a deeper truth about how adolescents use media: they’re seeking connection,” the study found. “They want to relate to the characters they see, connect with parts of themselves they see represented, and perhaps most of all they want to build community with their peers.”
Part of that connection is shared the experience of consuming the same media. Another is discussing those experiences with friends.
“TV and movies lead the conversation: 53% of teens discuss them with friends more than social media content, while only 18.6% favor social media,” according to the report. “When they want to movie something with their friends, adolescents choose movies more than any other type of media (31.2%), and twice as often as social media (15.6%).”
In other words, according to UCLA, “traditional media is social, too.”
And when it comes to the type of connections, adolescents are more interested in friendship than romance.
Nearly 60% of respondents said they “want to see more content where the central relationships are friendships.” And even when things do turn romantic, 60.9% want to see romantic relationships that are “more about the friendship between the couple than sex.”
Those insights are borne out by the list generated when adolescents were asked, “What is your favorite TV show or movie?”
Most of the best 10 results feature “shows and movies with friendship at their core” — i.e. Stranger Things, Spongebob Squarepants, K-pop demon hunters, TSITP, Spider-Man, etc. Even when these shows involve fantasy or supernatural elements, they are “relatively grounded, low-fantasy titles, where supernatural things happen in a world that looks like ours – and often to ‘normal’ people.”
Things this cohort dislikes onscreen include relationships “based solely on physical attraction,” toxic relationships which are “framed as romantic” and relationships “based mostly on physical attraction.” In fact, according to the survey, 48.4% of respondents feel that there’s “too much sex and sexual content in TV and movies.”
About the Author
