High School

2004 · Mark Waters · 97 min · Comedy

Tina Fey's razor-sharp script turned a teen comedy into a cultural institution, with quotable lines on every page and a surprisingly incisive take on the social warfare of high school.

1999 · Stephen Chbosky · 213 pages · Literary Fiction

Chbosky's epistolary coming-of-age novel captures the raw intensity of adolescence with startling honesty, building quietly toward revelations that reframe everything that came before.

1993 · 7 Seasons · ABC · Comedy

Boy Meets World is the rare coming-of-age sitcom that actually grew up with its audience, following Cory Matthews from middle school through college with a sincerity and emotional depth that most TGIF shows never attempted. Ben Savage and Rider Strong's friendship is the show's backbone, William Daniels' Mr. Feeny is one of television's great mentor figures, and the series handles the transition from childhood comedy to young-adult drama with more grace than it gets credit for. The college seasons are weaker than the high school years, and some dramatic turns in later seasons strain the sitcom format, but the emotional core holds across all seven seasons.

1993 · Richard Linklater · 102 min · Comedy

Richard Linklater's plotless, vibes-driven hangout movie captures the last day of school in 1976 with such authenticity that you can practically smell the parking lot and hear the Aerosmith on the car stereo.

1999 · Gil Junger · 97 min · Romantic Comedy

A charming Shakespeare adaptation that gave Heath Ledger his breakout role and delivered a teen romance with genuine wit, real chemistry, and a poem scene that still makes people cry.

2024 · 1 Season · FX · Comedy

A sharp, timely comedy about a gay high school English teacher navigating culture wars, student sensitivity, and administrative cowardice, featuring a breakout performance from creator Brian Jordan Alvarez.

1982 · Amy Heckerling · 90 min · Comedy

A raunchier, messier precursor to the polished teen comedies that followed, memorable primarily for Sean Penn's iconic Spicoli and a willingness to treat its teenage characters as messy, complicated people.

2004 · Jared Hess · 96 min · Comedy

A profoundly weird, deliberately paced indie comedy that became a cultural phenomenon through sheer force of oddness, rewarding those who connect with its awkward wavelength and baffling everyone else.

2004 · Mark Rosman · 95 min · Romance / Comedy

A Cinderella Story transplants the fairy tale to a San Fernando Valley diner and a flip-phone pen-palship, Hilary Duff's orphaned waitress trading anonymous soulmate texts with a secret correspondent who turns out to be the quarterback, a dropped phone standing in for the slipper. The film runs its stencil with total sincerity, Jennifer Coolidge's salmon-obsessed stepmother supplies the comic estate, and the era's texting-courtship time capsule grew more charming as the technology aged. The writing is cardboard beyond its leads, the fairy godmother diner logic runs on pure convenience, and the rating reflects it. For the sleepover demographic that memorized it, none of that ever mattered.

1989 · 4 Seasons · NBC · Comedy

Saved by the Bell is a show that shouldn't work on paper. The acting is broad, the plots are formulaic, the lessons are heavy-handed, and the school has approximately six students. Yet it became a defining piece of 1990s teen culture, and its hold on the people who grew up watching it is almost impossible to break. Mark-Paul Gosselaar's Zack Morris carries the show with charm that papers over every structural weakness, and the ensemble's chemistry creates something warmer and more enduring than the scripts alone deserve. It's pure nostalgia television, and whether that's enough depends on when you were born.