When Megan Park was on the young adult drama “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” (2008-13), her character was far more focused on having sex than on maintaining her friendships.
In real life, her experience differed. “As a young actor working in Y.A., it just felt really inauthentic that it was always centered around the romance,” Park said in a video interview. “Behind the scenes, the female friendships are what I took away from that show.” She has remained friends with her former co-stars.
In general, women prioritizing romantic relationships is a through-line of most young adult shows, with friends routinely betraying one another or sabotaging their relationship in favor of a romance.
In “Gossip Girl,” Serena (Blake Lively) and Blair (Leighton Meester) repeatedly ditched each other to go after the same guys. In “One Tree Hill,” Peyton (Hilarie Burton) chooses kissing Lucas (Chad Michael Murray) over maintaining her long-term friendship with Brooke (Sophia Bush). In “Girls,” Jessa (Jemima Kirke) ended up with Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) volatile ex-boyfriend.
These are precisely the kinds of soapy rivalries and entanglements the creators of two hit shows this summer, “Sterling Point” and “Off Campus,” sought to avoid. At a glance, they don’t seem similar: One is a rural family saga set on a Canadian lake; the other a sexy campus romance. But both are anchored by supportive friendships intended by the creators as correctives to earlier depictions of how girls get along. (Both shows are also on Amazon Prime Video, which has become a Y.A. hub that also includes titles like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and “Every Summer After.”)
“I think we were absolutely taught that women should compete with each other,” Louisa Levy, the creator of “Off Campus” said in an interview. “I certainly wanted to write female friendships that do reflect my own female friendships and the things that I find are what I rely on just to get through the day.” In “Sterling Point,” which began streaming last month, 17-year-old Annie (Ella Rubin) finds out a grandfather she didn’t know left an island to her in the Muskoka Lakes region, north of Toronto. When she arrives she meets 16-year-old Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), and they both try to solve unanswered questions about their lives and their relationship to one another.
The show has some of the classic trappings of a young adult drama, including a love triangle, absent authority figures and coming-of-age moments. But it differs from earlier series in its core focus on female friendship. Instead of cattiness and back-stabbing, Annie and Ramona give each other grace, encouragement and necessary pushback. In one poignant scene, Ramona makes Annie a crown of flowers to retroactively commemorate her first period, after she found out that Annie never told anyone about it because her mother was dead.
When working on “Sterling Point,” Park, the creator and showrunner, intentionally made crushes and boyfriends secondary.
“I really wanted to make an effort to have the central story line be about family and sisterhood,” Park said. “Sure, the romance is fun to watch, and that’s a part of what we love about Y.A., but it’s definitely not at the forefront of every young person’s experience.”
She added: “I hope that people watch this show and can see it’s not abnormal to not be in love when you’re 16, or 18 or 19. Like, that’s very real.”
For Park, the first show that she felt like accurately illustrated her experience with female friends was “Broad City.” The sitcom was created by and starred Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, who were best friends in real life.
“That show really changed a lot for me and made me really want to get into writing and directing because obviously it was centered around the female friendship,” Park said. “I started to find shows like that, but I feel like during my time as a millennial, it was few and far between.”
“Off Campus,” which was released in May, focuses on the romantic life of college hockey players but also explores a friendship between Hannah (Ella Bright) and Allie (Mika Abdalla) as they support each other’s career ambitions, work through breakups and help each other process sexual trauma.
Levy said “Grey’s Anatomy” was the inflection point for her. Created by Shonda Rhimes, the medical drama initially focuses on the surgeons Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh). “I really loved how they supported each other” in a competitive environment, Levy said.
Yalda T. Uhls, a psychologist and researcher at U.C.L.A. and former executive at movie studios like MGM and Sony, researches Gen Z attitudes about sex and romance in TV and movies. Since 2023 she has released an annual report, “Teens & Screens,” that explores what themes and stories young adults want to see reflected in TV, movies and social media.
The most recent study in 2025 said that 60 percent of respondents wanted to see more content where friendship was central to the plot, and 61 percent wanted to see romances that focused more on the emotional connection between the couple rather than the sex. (The results align with data that Gen Z overall is having less sex than did past generations.)
Separately, Levy and Park each said that more realistic portrayals of female friendship on TV is, in part, because women are the ones making decisions behind the scenes. Levy noted that Amazon, the home of both shows, “has lots of women who are in key positions,” mentioning Carina Walker, the head of Y.A., and Brianna Kaufman, a development executive.
“Previously when I’ve tried writing stories like this, when the women I know have tried writing stories like these, we’ve hit so many walls and gates that didn’t open for us,” Levy said. “And that just wasn’t the case here.”
With the recent influx of shows like “Firefly Lane,” “Dead to Me” and “The Five-Star Weekend,” which explores female friendship among older characters, a tide seems to be turning. Still, while Levy and Park were able to write stories that are highly relatable to women, they agree that such latitude remains too rare in television.
“I feel very lucky that I got a lot of creative freedom,” Park said. “There’s just still not enough women making movies and TV shows.”
The post The Summer When TV Started to Portray Female Friendship Accurately appeared first on New York Times.
