Teens to Hollywood: Enough sex

LOS ANGELES – Movies and TV shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: we prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. We like fantasy as a genre more and more. But please, please, fix how you incorporate social media into storylines. It’s a shudder.

Young people between the ages of 10 and 24 think about movies, TV shows, video games and social media, according to a study released Oct. 24.

A Teens & Screens study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found that 63.5 percent of participants wanted content that depicted platonic relationships rather than romance and sex. This is up from 51.5 percent in 2023. (Questions related to romance and sex were not shown to participants aged 10 to 13).

Of course, what research participants say and what they actually do can be very different. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021-present), a raunchy comedy; Emily in Paris (from 2020 to present), a passionate romance; and Tell Me a Lie (2022-present), a steamy soap.

Films such as Les Miserables (2023), in which insatiable American actress Emma Stone roamed a Paris brothel, and the sexually explicit We Are All Strangers (2023) attracted surprisingly large audiences of people in their 20s, box office analysts said. .

The 2024 study was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.

“We’re trying to change the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Dr. Yalda Uls, founder and executive director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, based at UCLA. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their kids are doing in Los Angeles, and that doesn’t reflect what young people really want.”

Dr Uhls acknowledged the possibility that participants were saying one thing while doing another, but she believes this is not a common occurrence.

“The programs that are being offered now are based on what adults think they want, and if they have no other choice, teenagers will have to choose that,” she said.

Dr. Uhls left a career in film and television — she worked at studios such as Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — to earn a doctorate in developmental psychology and found the center. As part of her work, she takes groups of teenagers into entertainment companies to discuss ways to represent them authentically.

For the 2024 report, she and her team also asked young people how they decide which movies and TV shows to watch. The two most important factors were plot and ease of access.

Interestingly, given how Hollywood marketers have embraced TikTok and Instagram influencers, study participants cited “influencer endorsements” as one of the worst ways to convince them to watch.

Dr Uhls noted that 36 per cent of participants named fantasy as their favorite genre, compared to 16 per cent in 2023. “It tells me how badly teenagers want to escape,” she said. “The real world is awesome.” NYTIMES