Top 10 TV Shows: Coming of Age
The highest-graded coming-of-age TV shows we have reviewed, best first.
Lord of the FliesThe first television version of Golding's novel, and it finds the horror in how quickly the boys agree with each other.Read the review
Friday Night LightsA show about high school football that is really about a marriage, and one of the warmest dramas American television has made.
Freaks and GeeksEighteen episodes, twelve of them aired, and still the most honest hour anyone has made about being sixteen.
Reservation DogsFour Indigenous teenagers plan to leave Oklahoma, and the show they are in is the best comedy of its years about staying.
UnorthodoxFour tight episodes about leaving a closed world, held together by Shira Haas, and far more convincing in Williamsburg than in the Berlin it escapes to.
Big MouthA filthy and surprisingly kind cartoon about puberty with a voice cast in top form, stretched over eight seasons until it ran short of new things to say.
Gilmore GirlsNobody talks like this, and twenty minutes in you stop caring, because the talking is the show.
The TestamentsGilead from inside a school for future wives: a superb young cast and a lighter touch than late Handmaid's Tale, slowed by narration that explains too much.
Percy Jackson and the OlympiansThe faithful adaptation the books waited fifteen years for, made on a budget that shows in every frame.
GleeA high school musical that became a pop phenomenon; the numbers and the cast stay terrific long after the writing loses its way.
