The Best Teen TV Dramas of the 2010s and 2020s, Ranked

Teen dramas spent the 2010s getting darker, stranger and much more ambitious. By the 2020s, shows about high school were routinely tackling addiction, murder, class warfare and identity, while still finding time for terrible relationships and parents who somehow never notice anything.

The best ones understand a simple rule: teenagers take their problems completely seriously, so the show has to as well. These are the series that did it best.

10. Never Have I Ever

Netflix, 2020-2023

Never Have I Ever could've settled for being a charming high-school comedy. Instead, it gave Devi Vishwakumar, played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, enough anger, grief and spectacularly bad judgment to make her feel like an actual teenager rather than a collection of coming-of-age clichés.

Created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, the series ran for four seasons from 2020 to 2023. Its love triangles got plenty of attention, but Devi's relationship with her mother Nalini gave the show its real weight. Few teen series have been this funny while letting grief stay messy.

9. Sex Education

Netflix, 2019-2023

The title made Sex Education sound like a raunchy comedy. And yes, there was plenty of that. But underneath the jokes was one of Netflix's warmest ensemble dramas.

Otis, Maeve, Eric, Aimee and the rest of Moordale's students were allowed to be selfish, confused, kind and occasionally unbearable. The show's deliberately hard-to-place British-American aesthetic made the school look unlike almost any real one, yet its best emotional problems felt painfully familiar.

The later seasons became crowded, especially after major cast changes. But the first two seasons remain an unusually sharp portrait of teenagers trying to understand intimacy before they've figured themselves out.

8. Elite

Netflix, 2018-2024

Put wealthy teenagers in an exclusive Spanish school, add working-class outsiders, then throw in a murder. Elite knew exactly what kind of show it wanted to be.

The first season arrived in 2018, with its mystery built around the death of Marina. What followed mixed glossy soap opera with class resentment, crime and relationships that almost always seemed one bad decision away from disaster.

Later seasons pushed the formula harder and lost some of the original cast chemistry. Still, early Elite is dangerously easy to binge. One episode becomes four before you've noticed what happened.

7. Yellowjackets

Showtime, 2021-present

Yellowjackets stretches the definition of teen drama because half its story follows the characters as adults. The teenage half earns its place here anyway.

After a girls' high-school soccer team survives a 1996 plane crash, the stranded players gradually build their own frightening social order. The series jumps between their time in the wilderness and the consequences decades later.

That structure gives Yellowjackets something most teen dramas don't have: hindsight. You see teenage decisions through the eyes of adults who've spent years trying, and failing, to live with them.

6. Riverdale

The CW, 2017-2023

Yes, Riverdale became ridiculous. That's part of the appeal.

It began in 2017 as a moody murder mystery featuring Archie Comics characters and eventually embraced cults, alternate realities, superpowers and plots that sounded increasingly impossible to explain to anyone who'd stopped watching three seasons earlier.

But peak Riverdale had style to burn. Its neon lighting, melodramatic dialogue and absolute refusal to behave like a normal teen series made it one of the defining young-adult shows of its era. Consistency isn't its strength. Personality absolutely is.

5. Euphoria

HBO, 2019-present

Few teen shows of the past decade have been copied as visibly as Euphoria. You can see its fingerprints in music videos, fashion shoots and other series that suddenly discovered purple lighting.

Zendaya's performance as Rue Bennett is the reason the show survives its own excesses. She won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series twice for the role, becoming the youngest two-time winner in that category.

The show's depiction of addiction can be brutal, while its visual style sometimes threatens to overpower the characters. But when Euphoria focuses tightly on Rue and her family, it's devastatingly effective.

4. Heartstopper

Netflix, 2022-present

Not every memorable teen drama needs a corpse, drug addiction or sinister secret society.

Based on Alice Oseman's graphic novels, Heartstopper follows Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson as friendship turns into romance. Kit Connor and Joe Locke give the series an awkwardness that's essential to making it work. Conversations pause. People say the wrong thing. Feelings arrive before anyone has prepared a speech about them.

Its gentleness is deliberate, but there's substance underneath it. Bullying, eating disorders, coming out and mental health all enter the story without turning the characters into problems that need solving.

3. 13 Reasons Why

Netflix, 2017-2020

No show on this ranking is harder to recommend without qualifications.

The first season of 13 Reasons Why, adapted from Jay Asher's novel, became one of Netflix's biggest teen-TV talking points after its 2017 release. Its story follows Clay Jensen as he listens to tapes left behind by Hannah Baker explaining the events preceding her suicide.

The series drew serious criticism over its handling of suicide and other traumatic subjects, and later seasons became increasingly sensational. But its cultural impact on 2010s teen television is difficult to ignore. For better and worse, it pushed difficult conversations directly into the mainstream.

2. Skins

E4, 2007-2013

Technically, Skins started before the 2010s. But its influence was so strong throughout the decade that leaving it out would make the ranking feel incomplete.

The British series famously replaced its central cast every two seasons, letting characters graduate instead of keeping them trapped in television high school forever. Its second and third generations carried the show through much of the early 2010s.

More importantly, Skins trusted young characters to be ugly, funny, reckless and emotionally complicated. You can draw a fairly straight line from its willingness to go there to later shows such as Euphoria.

1. Derry Girls

Channel 4, 2018-2022

The funniest show here also takes the top spot.

Created by Lisa McGee, Derry Girls follows five teenagers growing up in Northern Ireland during the final years of the Troubles. The historical setting matters, but the characters are usually more concerned with school, crushes, concerts and whatever disaster Erin has created for herself.

That's precisely why it works. Huge political events sit alongside tiny teenage emergencies, and neither feels fake. The series ran for three seasons between 2018 and 2022 and knew when to stop, a quality several shows further down this ranking could've used.

And Sister Michael alone would've earned it a place.

Why You Should Care

Teen dramas often become accidental time capsules. The phones, clothes and slang date quickly, but the best shows preserve something harder to fake: what a particular generation worried about when adults weren't listening.

You don't need to care about high school television to appreciate Derry Girls, Euphoria or Yellowjackets. They're good dramas because their teenage characters aren't treated as practice versions of adults.

What to Watch Next

If you've exhausted the obvious choices, start with My Mad Fat Diary (2013-2015), a funny and painfully honest British series about mental health, friendship and body image. Then try Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), which follows four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma and has one of the best young ensembles of the decade.

And if what you really want is another messy mystery with teenagers making questionable decisions, watch Cruel Summer (2021-2023). Teen television may change its clothes every few years. Bad decisions remain undefeated.