Good Trouble's final run marks the end of an era for coming-of-age TV

To misquote Paula Cole: “Where have all the coming-of-age shows gone?” Well, to streaming, of course. Over the last few years, Netflix & Co. have become the de rigueur destinations if you’re looking for young-adult TV titles that are both spirited and substantial, that don’t render the plights of its bright-eyed subjects as overly sensational or silly. (See Heartstopper, Never Have I Ever, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Sex Education, and Ginny & Georgia for proof.) But back in the day, that safe zone was Freeform, an era that will sadly come to a close with the end of its flagship series, Good Trouble.

In December, it was announced that the Disney-owned cable network would be canceling Good Trouble—a spin-off of another Freeform favorite, the family drama The Fosters, that follows sisters Callie (Maia Mitchell) and Mariana Adams Foster (Cierra Ramirez) as they move from San Diego to Los Angeles to pursue careers in law and tech, respectively. Also on the chopping block was the similarly youth-focused anthology series, Cruel Summer.

Though the latter teen thriller was cut clean after its second season, Good Trouble fans would graciously at least get to see a half-season’s worth of already-filmed new episodes before saying one last goodbye to Mariana, Callie and the Coterie crew, with the back-half of its fifth—and now final—season having kicked off earlier this month. Will Mariana and Evan co-CEO-ing Speckulate reignite their romance? Will Malika continue her political career or return to her activist past? Are Gael and Jay endgame? And will we get to see that wedding between Callie and Jamie? Viewers will hopefully get answers to all of those questions before the show bows out, reportedly with a supersized finale on March 4, per Deadline.

On a grander scale, the cancellations of Freeform’s last scripted originals—coupled with the outgoing coming-of-age comedy Grown-ish, itself a spinoff centered on Black-ish’s college-age daughter Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi)—mark a significant shift for a television network with deep roots in the teen TV tradition, stretching back to when the channel was known as Fox Family. In the late ’90s, the then-News Corp-owned network ushered in a wave of original programming targeting American teens and tweens in response to what was happening over on the WB and UPN: the Olsen twins’ sitcom So Little Time, the Hayden Christensen-led teen drama Higher Ground, and the pop-group comedy S Club 7 In Miami, among others.

New owner The Walt Disney Company would rebrand that channel as ABC Family in the early aughts and further firm up its youthful focus with the fantasy drama Kyle XY, the college-set dramedy Greek, and the Shailene Woodley breakout The Secret Life Of The American Teenager, as well as the network’s most successful original series, Pretty Little Liars, based on Sara Shepard’s series of YA mystery novels. The Fosters—which introduced TV fans to Callie and Mariana as well as their multiethnic, blended family led by lesbian moms Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum)—would debut in 2013, with Good Trouble following six years later.

Rebranded yet again in 2016 as Freeform, the network would carve out its own youth-skewing identity with shows like the millennial workplace dramedy The Bold Type, the supernatural series Shadowhunters, and the aforementioned The Fosters spinoff. And as recently as September 2023, network executives were committed to continuing that long-running legacy of scripted young adult fare, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. However, the powers that be haven’t made any official proclamations about the future of Freeform’s scripted originals following the runs of Grown-ish and Good Trouble. Will Freeform go the way of TNT and TBS and forgo its culture of scripted content for yet more syndicated reruns, reality shows, and holiday-movie marathons? If so, the future of cable television exclusively made for teens—and not just for adults jonesing for adolescence (ahem, Euphoria)—is looking dire.

Sure, with the proliferation of streamers, the youngins will always have something relatable to binge. But having an entire network catering to their romantic lives, their professional goals, their familial tensions, their hidden fears, their long-held dreams, and all of the rest of the wonderful messiness that make up those formative years of teenagedom isn’t just a matter of sheer entertainment. It’s a support system. Freeform fans have grown up alongside Good Trouble’s Callie and Mariana for over a decade and more than 80 hour-long episodes, sat beside the young women as they navigated love and loss, setbacks and success. Can you get that with an eight-episode streaming series that might not return for two, three years at a time?

The CW, itself a former stalwart of teen-driven television with shows like The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, and the recently wrapped Riverdale, underwent a similar identity crisis in the past year, scaling down the teen soaps and superhero dramas that came to define the network for cheaper-to-make unscripted shows and sports coverage. Adolescents are already low on IRL spaces—malls and parks and libraries and such—where they can be their most authentically mercurial, melodramatic, majestic selves. What will happen when they lose their onscreen spaces, too?