CW
Among the many headaches that teens endure these days, dealing with your hip-deficient parents is high on the list. It makes no difference whether you're Hannah Montana, or a kid in The Vampire Diaries, you face daily resistance over the most basic things—like putting on a belly shirt (which--sigh--for the millionth time, is the same kind of shirt all the freshman girls are wearing). For many teenagers, the idea of having young, cool parents is too foreign and unlikely to even consider. But, oh, how great would that be?
When The CW's new teen show, Life Unexpected (Mondays, 9 PM ET), debuts tonight, it goes about answering that question. The sassy (aren't they always?) teen at its center, Lux (Britt Robertson) has grown up without parents, shuttling from one foster home to another. The only people she considers family are her friends—other kids who've also been bouncing around the foster care system.
At 16, Lux can ostensibly be "emancipated" and live with her friends, as long as her birth parents, Baze (Kristoffer Polaha) and Cate (Shiri Appleby), legally sign off on it. So she tracks them down, separately, and what do you know? They're both young, cool, hipsters in faded designer jeans and trendily distressed T-shirts. (It helps that they live in gritty Portland, Oregon, where apparently all the young adults' apartments have a cool, indie feel.) Not only does Lux have actual parents, she has parents who use Facebook and forget to censor their casual references to sex. For a teenager, these people are the parental holy grail.
Sure, it sucks when the judge refuses to grant Lux her freedom. But this is one killer consolation prize. (Baze and Cate are no longer a couple--never were, really--but the court has granted Cate custody of Luz.)
Liz Tigelaar, the show's co-creator, conceived the idea out of her own adolescent experiences. “I was briefly in foster care when I was a baby, but I was adopted," she said. She didn't meet her birth parents until she was an adult, which gave her lots of time to idealize them as a teenager. "No matter how great your own family is--and my [adoptive] parents are wonderful--when you’re 16 and fighting with your mom, you're like, 'My real, young, cool, hot mom totally understands. She wouldn’t have interfered.'”
Of course, even a young, hip mom is still human. And still a mom. "The reality of Cate is different than the Cate [that Lux] conjured up in her mind," says Tigelaar. So the story deals with "being disappointed in somebody."
No doubt the show will delve into an issue that's all too relevant today: Parents who are tempted to treat their children as friends. It's only natural in a society that exalts youth—and equates being cool and current with being attractive. The problems arise when parents loosen necessary boundaries (say, around drinking or drugs or sex) because they want their kids to like them. Or, at least, not be disappointed in them.
What if a teenager got her wish for young, hip parents? Well, here's the sad truth: They still might have issues with the belly shirt.
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Do you think most teens wish they had younger, cooler parents?
