There is a reason coming-of-age stories remain compelling long after we’ve actually come of age.
The best ones aren’t really about being a teenager. They’re about becoming someone — experimenting with identity, making spectacularly bad decisions, falling in love for the first time and discovering that growing up rarely happens as neatly as we’re told it will.
Some of these shows are funny. Others are uncomfortable, nostalgic or genuinely heartbreaking. What they share is an ability to make adolescence feel complicated rather than cute.
From the heightened world of Euphoria to the awkward tenderness of Heartstopper, these are seven coming-of-age shows worth watching.
Euphoria
Euphoria isn’t interested in making adolescence look innocent.
HBO’s visually distinctive drama follows Rue Bennett and the teenagers around her as they navigate addiction, relationships, sex, identity, family and the sometimes brutal emotional intensity of being young.
Zendaya’s performance as Rue gives the series its emotional centre, but Euphoria became a cultural phenomenon for more than its performances. Its saturated cinematography, glittering makeup, fashion and music helped create an aesthetic that escaped the television screen and influenced popular culture.
It’s frequently beautiful to look at, but the subjects underneath that beauty can be extremely dark. This is very much a coming-of-age drama for mature audiences rather than comforting teenage nostalgia.
Heartstopper
If Euphoria explores adolescence at its most chaotic, Heartstopper approaches growing up with considerably more tenderness.
Based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novels, the series begins with the friendship between Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson and develops into a larger story about love, friendship, sexuality, identity and finding people around whom you can actually be yourself.
Its warmth doesn’t mean everything is easy. The characters encounter bullying, uncertainty, family tensions and mental-health struggles, but the series allows kindness and friendship to matter just as much as conflict.
That makes Heartstopper something surprisingly rare: a coming-of-age series that understands growing up can hurt without suggesting pain is the only interesting thing about being young.
The Chi
Created by Lena Waithe, The Chi takes a broader approach to coming of age by placing individual stories inside a larger portrait of community life on Chicago’s South Side.
Young characters grow up alongside adults who are dealing with relationships, work, family, responsibility and the consequences of choices made years earlier. That intergenerational perspective is one of the things that separates the series from more conventional teen dramas.
The result is less a story about one particular teenage experience than an exploration of how people and communities shape one another.
Never Have I Ever
Devi Vishwakumar wants the kind of teenage life that sounds straightforward when she imagines it: popularity, romance and an exciting social life.
Naturally, almost nothing goes according to plan.
Never Have I Ever turns that familiar teenage ambition into something much richer by placing grief, family expectations, friendship and Devi’s Indian-American identity alongside the crushes and school drama.
Devi can be selfish, impulsive and spectacularly frustrating. That’s also why she works. Growing up isn’t particularly convincing when the protagonist always makes the emotionally mature decision.
Sex Education
The title suggests one thing. The series ultimately became about considerably more.
Netflix’s Sex Education begins with socially awkward Otis Milburn dispensing relationship advice to his classmates despite having plenty of problems of his own. From there, it develops into an ensemble story about intimacy, identity, friendship, insecurity and communication.
Its exaggerated school environment gives the series an almost timeless quality, while its characters are allowed to be messy, funny and vulnerable.
Beneath all the comedy is a surprisingly simple idea: people become much easier to understand once they actually start talking to one another.
Skins
Long before today’s prestige teen dramas began pushing boundaries, Britain’s Skins was already doing it.
The Bristol-set series follows groups of teenagers through friendship, relationships, family problems, sexuality, substance use, mental health and the spectacularly reckless decisions that defined much of the show’s reputation.
Its unusual structure helped keep it fresh. Rather than following the same characters indefinitely, Skins largely introduced a new generation every two seasons.
The series also became an early showcase for actors who would go on to much larger careers, including Dev Patel, Nicholas Hoult, Kaya Scodelario and Daniel Kaluuya.
Some elements inevitably feel tied to the era in which it was made. Its rawness, however, remains enormously influential on the teen dramas that followed.
Derry Girls
Not every coming-of-age story needs to treat adolescence like a permanent existential crisis.
Derry Girls follows Erin and her friends growing up in Northern Ireland during the final years of the Troubles. Against that extraordinary historical background, their immediate concerns are hilariously ordinary: parents, school, crushes, embarrassing themselves and escaping whatever disaster they accidentally created five minutes earlier.
That contrast is what makes the series special. History is unfolding around these teenagers, but they’re still teenagers. Life doesn’t stop being ridiculous simply because something serious is happening outside the front door.
It’s funny, specific and ultimately very moving — particularly when the characters begin realizing that childhood isn’t going to last forever.
Why We Keep Watching Stories About Growing Up
You don’t need to be sixteen to recognize yourself in a coming-of-age story.
The clothes change. The music changes. The technology certainly changes. But that strange period when you’re trying to work out who you are while simultaneously worrying about what everyone else thinks of you remains remarkably familiar.
Perhaps that’s why these shows work so well for adults too. We aren’t necessarily watching because we want our teenage years back.
Sometimes it’s simply reassuring to remember how far we’ve come since them.