Teens to Hollywood: Enough sex, already

LOS ANGELES — Movies and television shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. (There’s enough porn online as it is.) We do like fantasy as a genre, increasingly so. But please, pretty please, fix how you incorporate social media into storylines. It’s cringe.

That is what young people — ages 10 to 24 — think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study released Thursday.

The study, Teens &Screens, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 63.5% of participants said they wanted content that depicted platonic relationships, as opposed to romance and sex. That is up from 51.5% last year. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants ages 10 to 13.)

Of course, what study participants say and what they actually do can vary wildly. There is ample evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a raunchy comedy; “Emily in Paris,” an impassioned romance; and “Tell Me Lies,” a steamy soap.

Movies like “Poor Things,” which found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank “All of Us Strangers” attracted a surprisingly large audience of people in their early 20s, according to box office analysts.

This year’s study was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.

“We’re trying to shift the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and CEO of the Center for Scholars &Storytellers, which is based at UCLA. “

Uhls acknowledged the possibility that participants were saying one thing while doing another, but she thinks that isn’t common. “The programming currently being offered is based on what adults think they want, and if they have no other choice, teens will have to choose that,” she said.

Uhls left a career in movies and television — she worked at studios like Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — to get her doctorate in developmental psychology and start the center. As part of her work, she brings groups of teenagers into entertainment companies to talk about ways to authentically represent them.

For this year’s report, Uhls and her team also asked young people how they decide which movies and television shows to watch. The two most important factors were plot and ease of access. Interestingly, given the manner in which Hollywood marketers have embraced TikTok and Instagram influencers, the study’s participants ranked “influencer recommendations” as one of the worst ways to convince them to watch.

Uhls noted that 36% of participants ranked fantasy as their favorite genre, up from 16% last year.

“That tells me how badly adolescents want escape,” she said. “The real world is overwhelming.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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