the worst part about entering your late thirties is not the back pain or realizing every useful household object has become an acceptable birthday gift. it is knowing the CW may finally stop believing you attend high school and immediately cast you as somebody’s suspiciously young father.
this is obviously a joke. I am 37, and nobody has asked me to lean against a locker while explaining that the homecoming dance has changed everything. but television has spent decades teaching us that high school is not an age. it is a lighting package.
give an adult a backpack, remove one day of beard growth, and place him beside a painted cinder-block wall. congratulations: this man has algebra after lunch. he may have a mortgage. he may have strong opinions about lumbar support. none of that matters once the bell rings.
high school is a set of props
teen dramas need teenage problems but adult performers. there are practical reasons for that. adults can work longer hours, handle heavier material, and arrive on set without an actual school day competing with the fictional one. the practical decision eventually became an aesthetic: television teenagers are adults with excellent skin who have never been permitted to own a sensible jacket.
this distorts the scale at both ends. actual teenagers look unfinished because they are. television teenagers arrive assembled. they have adult faces, adult bodies, adult confidence, and a plot that requires them to run a nightclub after chemistry. viewers learn to accept 25 as 16 because the show has supplied lockers and one deeply overfunded school dance.
then the lockers disappear.
one reply to my post got the transition exactly right: “then you immediately become the designated adult.” there is no television category for a person who has stopped passing for fictional high school but does not yet feel like the person who should cancel the field trip. you are either sneaking out of the house or standing in the kitchen waiting for your child to sneak back in.
the dad role has already read your résumé
this is how popular culture likes age: sorted, visible, and useful to the plot. youth means possibility. parenthood means authority, disappointment, or a secret that will be revealed during sweeps. the middle is narratively inconvenient. a 37-year-old can spend an entire real day being competent at work, confused in a grocery store, attracted to somebody inappropriate, and worried about an elderly relative. television would prefer to know whether he is going to prom or forbidding it.
gay culture has its own version of this sorting problem. the internet will let a man remain a “twink” until one birthday causes an emergency board meeting. dating apps ask for an age and convert a gradual human process into a filter boundary. a person does not become fundamentally different at midnight, but the menu needs somewhere to put him.
I have already written about why I would not let 20-year-old me conduct my performance review. he had more hair, worse judgment, and no idea how often a body can hurt because it slept in a slightly ambitious position. he is not the standard. neither is a casting director deciding whether my face says “senior year” or “principal who knows more than he admits.”
real adulthood does not have a time jump
the useful thing about getting older is discovering how little actually changes on schedule. there is no episode where everyone returns after summer and your role has been reassigned. you accumulate knowledge, prescriptions, good pans, bad knees, old jokes, and people who remember previous versions of you. occasionally you look in the mirror and notice the costume department has made an adjustment without consulting you.
I may be approaching the end of my CW high-school eligibility. fine. I was never prepared for the homework. but I reject the premise that the only available promotion is “hot dad with a secret second family.” television can keep its age brackets.
I am going to stand beside these lockers until somebody brings me a backpack or a chair with proper lumbar support.