TV Eye

The Secret Life of the American Teenager

OMG! Nothing makes you feel, like, more old than seeing a "very special afterschool special" theme from your youth become the subject of a full-fledged TV series. While there is something to be said for having those formerly hush-hush subjects lose their stigma, it's rather frustrating to realize that TV is still resorting to the same old stereotypes. Nothing has changed. The haircuts just got better.

On the surface, it looks as if the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager is out to do something radical. The website (where you can watch full episodes of the original series) invites you in with the tagline, "We're doing something different." So I was really looking forward to "something different" when it came to The Secret Life – that is, something that would admit in a real and candid way that teenagers are thinking about, wanting, and having sex. While there is a lot of talk about sex on The Secret Life, how it approaches the subject is not particularly candid, nor is it as different as the ABC Family tagline promises. In the end, it's downright disappointing.

At the center of the series is Amy Juergens (Shailene Woodley). She's the resident "virgin" in the virgin-saint-whore triumvirate of the series – the good girl who goes to band camp a virgin and comes back knocked up. The resident saint is Christian cheerleader Grace Bowman (Megan Park). The whore is Adrian Lee (Francia Raisa). And wouldn't you know: The whore is dark and voluptuous, the saint is pretty and blond, and good-girl Amy barely looks like she's finished going through puberty.

That Amy got pregnant after the first try isn't as shocking as her description of losing her virginity. Because of the determination to keep Amy nice, her description sounds like a soft-focused rape instead of what was probably a fumbling, rushed, and awkward first experience. But that couldn't be the case, because that would imply that Amy wanted to have sex. And nice girls don't want to have sex, do they? And if they do, they certainly don't enjoy it.

On the other end of the spectrum is the saintly Grace, who has taken a vow of chastity until marriage, sending her very horny football player boyfriend Jack (Greg Finley) into the arms of Adrian. That secret tryst is short-lived, with Grace concluding that boys will be boys, just like her dad told her in the obligatory "I know what teenage boys want" talk. Grace decides to forgive Jack (she is a good Christian, after all). But she tells him he must respect her wishes to wait, which is apparently easy for her since she has absolutely no sexual desire whatsoever. That is not the case with Adrian, who has apparently been doing it forever. But even as the most experienced of the trio, Adrian is no more sexualized than a vase. And this is what disturbs me the most about The Secret Life of the American Teenager – that the discussion of female sexuality is absolutely nowhere to be found. None of the girls, including Adrian, is particularly sexual (sexy, yes, but not sexual). Sexual pleasure, curiosity, and desire are only spoken of in terms of the male experience. Does Adrian enjoy sex? Well, of course not – she's merely lonely, we learn in the second episode. And since she's the bad girl that we're supposed to eventually love, she can't enjoy sex in the same physical, primal way we're led to believe the boys do. For boys, sex is necessary and natural. For girls, sex only matters when you're married – or, if you want something (power, control, material wealth). Ironically, the one stable couple in the group is two Asian kids, Henry and Alice, who are so asexual that I thought they were brother and sister until I read otherwise on the website.

Series creator Brenda Hampton (7th Heaven) deserves some props for talking about a serious topic in a family-friendly way. I think. At least the idea of teens having sex is out of the closet in this otherwise amiable series. That it does so singing another verse of the same old song leaves me, like, bummed.

The Secret Life of the American Teenager airs Tuesdays at 8pm on ABC Family and online at www.abcfamily.go.com.