The CW, The WB, Fox — they all loved to pretend that their horny, over-lit melodramas were modern tragedies. One Tree Hill was Hamlet with basketballs. Riverdale was Macbeth in a milkshake diner. Dawson’s Creek quoted sonnets between sobs. These shows weren’t just dramas — they were epics. Every kiss was a war; every monologue, a soliloquy.

But here’s the truth: the teen drama has always been theatre for people who haven’t learned subtlety yet. It’s where we first practised longing out loud — where feelings were never implied, only declared at full volume under rain machines.

They thought they were writing Shakespeare. What they really made was pop poetry for kids who’d just discovered heartbreak and eyeliner.

One Tree Hill opened every episode with an existential quote. Sometimes Shakespeare, sometimes Nietzsche, sometimes a MySpace-era blog post in disguise. It didn’t matter — the message was clear: if you feel something deeply enough, it’s literature.

Lucas Scott would walk into a dimly lit gym and say something like, “There’s no darkness like the one inside your own heart,” while dribbling a basketball. Peyton would respond by sketching a bleeding heart on her wall and whispering, “People always leave.”

It was absurd — but it worked. Because for teenagers, everything does feel that big. The melodrama wasn’t exaggerated; it was honest. The stakes were always emotional, not mortal. Love was life or death because, back then, it felt like it.

If Shakespeare had access to Fall Out Boy lyrics and waterproof mascara, he’d have written for The WB too.

Then came Riverdale, the final form of the genre — a fever dream that started as Twin Peaks for Hot People and somehow ended with time travel, cults, organ harvesting, and inexplicable musical numbers. It wasn’t pretending to be Shakespeare anymore; it was Shakespeare having a breakdown on Tumblr.

There’s a strange genius to it. The show knew that sincerity had died, so it went all in on absurdity. It treated teenage emotion like Greek tragedy — overwrought, operatic, and occasionally performed in latex. Archie wasn’t a boy next door anymore; he was a symbol of how American television can turn even a milkshake into an existential crisis.

Watching Riverdale feels like reading Hamlet through a cracked iPhone screen — still dramatic, still about death and desire, but somehow now involving maple syrup.

All these shows shared the same DNA: beautiful people saying too much. They made vulnerability performative long before Instagram captions did. Every heartbreak came with a speech, every betrayal a voiceover.

That’s the secret power of the teen drama — it taught a generation of us how to narrate our pain. How to turn chaos into coherence. How to survive by speaking beautifully about things that were actually ugly.

We learned from Dawson and Marissa and Blair Waldorf that language could make heartbreak cinematic. That if you said something with enough conviction, it could feel like a revelation, even if it was nonsense.

Looking back, those shows weren’t really Shakespearean because of their structure — they were Shakespearean because of their hubris. Every character thought they were the lead. Every love story believed it was the great one.

And honestly? That’s what made them magic. They gave us permission to take ourselves too seriously before the world taught us to play it cool. They let us romanticise the chaos, name our pain, and quote Nietzsche in a hallway full of lockers.

We might laugh at them now, but they were our first taste of drama that felt like prophecy. Our first attempt at making art out of hormones.

Teen dramas didn’t just think they were Shakespeare.
They made us believe we were, too.