Edited by  Luca Barra · Danielle Hipkins Catherine O’Rawe · Dana Renga Contemporary Italian Youth Television Contemporary Italian Youth Television “Contemporary Italian Youth Television is a rich and diverse collection providing a masterly overview of contemporary youth television in Italy. With rapid transfor- mations in media distribution and markets, this book delivers comprehensive insights into both historical developments and contemporary trends, including the impact of global platforms like Netflix on Italian teen drama and youth representa- tion, responses by public national broadcaster RAI, and evolving representations of Italian youth across various platforms. As such it makes a valuable contribution to the expanding field of youth screen cultures.” —Jeanette Steemers, Professor of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London “For some time the expanding array of youth-oriented Italian television series has been a subject in search of a comprehensive English-language study. Contemporary Italian Youth Television remedies that, offering a field-defining survey comprised of over 30 essays by established and emerging scholars of Italian media. With a rich, accessibly written introduction charting the evolution of youth programming and Italian teen television’s global and transnational contexts, as well as interviews with key industry figures, the volume is a welcome and much needed addition to the growing body of works focusing on teen television outside of the United States and the UK.” —Allison Cooper, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Cinema Studies, Bowdoin College “Contemporary Italian Youth Television offers a timely intervention in media and television studies, charting the rise of youth-oriented Italian series within a global- ized, platform-driven landscape. Covering series such as SKAM Italia, Baby, Summertime, and The Sea Beyond, the volume interrogates questions of genre, representation, authorship, and transnational flow. Combining production analy- sis, audience research, and close textual readings, this collection foregrounds Italian youth television as a dynamic site for examining shifting industry logics, cultural identities, and screen aesthetics in the streaming era.” —Daniela Cardini, Professor of Television Studies, IULM University Luca Barra  •  Danielle Hipkins Catherine O’Rawe  •  Dana Renga Editors Contemporary Italian Youth Television ISBN 978-3-031-98063-3     ISBN 978-3-031-98064-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98064-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2026. This book is an open access publication. 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Editors Luca Barra Dipartimento delle Arti Università di Bologna Bologna, Italy Catherine O’Rawe Department of Italian University of Bristol Bristol, UK Danielle Hipkins Department of Communications, Drama, Film and Television University of Exeter Exeter, UK Dana Renga The Department of French and Italian The Ohio State University Columbus, OH, USA This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98064-0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ v Acknowledgements The editors would like to specially thank Demetrio Antolini and Michela Bertossa (The Ohio State University) for providing extremely valuable editorial assistance. Open Access for this volume was funded by UKRI (AHRC), in support of the project “A Girls’-Eye View: Girlhood on the Italian Screen Since 1950” (P.I. Danielle Hipkins, C.I. Romana Andò). Some portions of this research have also been made possible thanks to the research project “F-ACTOR.  Forms of Contemporary Media Professional Acting. Training, Recruitment and Management, Social Discourses in Italy (2000–2020)”, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PRIN 2020, P.I. Francesco Pitassio); and to the many editions of the “Mediating Italy in Global Culture” summer school at Università di Bologna. The cover photo is an image from Italian Netflix Original Summertime (2020–2022), produced by Cattleya. Credits: Stefania Rosini/Netflix. The editors would like to specially thank Francesca Carotti (Netflix Italia) and Karen Hassan (Cattleya) for their permission to use the image. vii Contents 1 ��Introduction: Bringing Youth Into Contemporary Italian Television�   1 Luca Barra, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine O’Rawe, and Dana Renga Part I � Trends�   33 2 ��From Three Steps over Heaven to Summertime: The Evolution of the “filone giovanilistico” Over Time and Screens�  35 Fabien Landron 3 ��Fashioning Identity in Contemporary Italian Youth Television Series�  47 Rebecca Bauman 4 ��“Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation”: The Role of Music in Italian Youth Television Series�  59 Enrico Zammarchi 5 ��“Teen” Sense of Place: The Representation of Italian Locations in Teen Television Series�  71 Paolo Carelli and Anna Sfardini viii 6 ��Not Another Teen Drama: Rai, Platformisation, and New Representations of Teenagers�  83 Stefania Antonioni and Chiara Checcaglini 7 ��Rai Fiction Teen Series for Mainstream Channels: Programming and Production�  95 Ylenia Caputo 8 ��“Ma che stai dicendo?” A Linguistic Overview of Teen Representation in Italian Television Series� 109 Viola Amelia Santiloni 9 ��Baby… One More Time: Netflix Italia’s Original First Teen Dramas and the Struggle to Build a New Genre� 121 Luca Barra 10 ��A Girls’-Eye View: Exploring Television Representations of Italian Girlhood Through the Lens of Italian Female Adolescence� 137 Romana Andò and Danielle Hipkins Part II � Texts�  149 11 ��Queer Identifications, Activism and Desires in Skam Italia� 151 Ilaria A. De Pascalis 12 ��“Vedo che siamo moderni, eh?” Representations of Social Media Use in Skam Italia� 167 Cecilia Brioni 13 ��Musica, Maestro! Notes on The Swan Company’s Teen Cast� 179 Emiliano Rossi 14 ��“Is This Italian TV?” How My Brilliant Friend Attained Success in Mainland China� 191 Xiaoran Zhang and Liao Zhang   Contents ix 15 ��Casa Surace’s Engagement with Southern Youth and National Success Among Young Italians� 203 Maria Elena Alampi 16 ��The Transmedia Universe of The Sea Beyond� 213 Catherine O’Rawe Part III � Close-Ups�  225 17 ��Male Bonding and Narrative Afterlives in Suburra: Blood on Rome� 227 Dana Renga 18 ��Incredible Casting: My Brilliant Friend� 233 Ellen Nerenberg 19 ��The Horrors of History in Netflix’s Curon� 239 Kathleen LaPenta 20 ��The Beach in Summertime� 245 Dan Paul 21 ��Wrecking the Lagoon: Reading Waste in We Are Who We Are’s Queer Adolescence� 251 Ilaria Puliti 22 ��We Are Who We Are or Queerness as Atmospheric� 257 Jonathan Mullins 23 ��Visualising the Invisible: Zero and Afro-Italian Urban Utopias� 263 Qian Liu 24 ��A Tale of Three Teenagers and a City: Romulus, or the Foundation of Rome According to Sky Italia� 269 Giancarlo Lombardi   Contents  x 25 ��The Pathos of Transnationalism: Exploring the Touristic Gaze in Anna� 275 Gerardo Pisacane 26 ��Generation 56k: Nostalgia as a Way to Convergence Media Practices� 281 Angela Maiello 27 ��An Astrological Guide for Broken Hearts, or Emily in Paris in Turin� 287 Jacqueline Reich 28 ��Luna Park: La dolce vita and Retro History� 293 Catherine O’Rawe 29 ��Coming of Age in Naples in The Lying Life of Adults� 299 Demetrio Antolini 30 ��Prisma: Building a Game of Mirrors� 303 Luca Barra 31 ��Teens in Prison: Control and Redemption in The Sea Beyond� 309 Paolo Noto Part IV � Interviews�  315 32 ��Putting Your Own Stamp on the Writing of Others: A Conversation with Ivan Silvestrini, Director of The Sea Beyond� 317 Luca Barra 33 ��Youth Culture, Diversity, and Italianness on Television: An Interview with Ludovico Bessegato� 329 Julia Heim   Contents xi 34 ��Desperately Seeking Diversity: Challenges and Breakthroughs in the Casting of Netflix’s Zero� 341 Gloria Dagnino and Stefano Guerini Rocco 35 ��“Indeed There Is Magic in Casting” An Interview with Sara Casani and Laura Muccino� 351 Dana Renga ��Index� 363   Contents  xiii Maria Elena Alampi  is an honorary postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on Italian cinema, gender, and precarity. She was a postdoctoral research fellow on the project A Girls’- Eye  View: Girlhood on the Italian Screen Since the 1950s (University of Exeter, 2021–2024), and holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, She published  The New Italian Cinema of Precarity with Peter Lang (2025). She co-edited the special issues Precarity and the Moving Image (Empedocles, 2022) and The Many Faces of Precarity on Screen (IJFMA, 2023). Romana Andò  is Associate Professor of Sociology of Communication at Sapienza University of Rome, where she teaches Audience Research. She currently serves as chair of the master’s degree programme in Fashion Studies. Her research interests include audience and fandom studies, media consumption practices, celebrities and content creators, fashion consumption, and fashion musealization. In recent years, she has con- ducted research and coordinated educational initiatives in Italian second- ary schools on adolescence, mental health, and media representations. She is Co-investigator of the project A Girls’-Eye View, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and coordinated by Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter). Among her recent publications is Bravi ragazzi. Così vicini così lontani. I maschi adolescenti oggi (Giulio Perrone, 2024). Notes on Contributors xiv  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Demetrio  Antolini  PhD, is a graduate teaching associate in the Department of French and Italian at the Ohio State University. He is a scholar of Italian film and cultural studies. In his dissertation project “Thinking with the City: Contemporary Neapolitan Cinema from 2012–2022,” he investigated the representation of the city of Naples, Italy, onscreen by combining textual film analysis with theories in urban studies. Stefania  Antonioni  is Associate professor of Television Studies at the Department of Communication, Humanities and International Studies (DISCUI) of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, where she is the director of the master’s degree programme in Communication and Advertising for Organizations. Her research focuses on Italian television seriality, teen series and girls’ representation, and consumption and reception of screen media. She is a member of the Italian Girlhood Network Studies. Among her latest publications are Sisters in Arms against the Pandemic. Female Figures in the TV Series The Rain and Anna, in Bruno, Campati, Carelli, Sfardini (eds.), Dystopian Worlds beyond Storytelling (2024), and Girl to Girl: Italian Girls and Girlhood Models in Serial Narratives (with Chiara Checcaglini) in Participations (2025). Luca Barra  is Professor of Television and Media Studies at Università di Bologna, Department of the Arts (DAR). His research mainly focuses on television production and distribution cultures, the international circula- tion of media products (and their national mediations), the history of Italian, European and US television, serial dramas, comedy and humour television genres, and the evolution of the contemporary media scenario. He has published five books, including La televisione italiana (Pearson, 2024, with Veronica Innocenti and Paola Brembilla), La programmazione televisiva. Palinsesto e on demand (Laterza, 2022), and La sitcom (Carocci, 2020). He co-edited A European Television Fiction Renaissance: Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation (Routledge, 2021, with Massimo Scaglioni) and Italian Contemporary Screen Performers (Palgrave, 2025, with Cristina Formenti, Mariapaola Pierini, and Francesco Pitassio). He is editor-in-chief of VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture and Studi Culturali. He is editorial consultant of the television studies journal and website Link. Idee per la tv. xv  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  Rebecca Bauman  is Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, where she is affiliated faculty in the Department of Film, Media, and Performing Arts. She is film and digital media reviews editor for the journal Italian American Review, and has recently published articles in such publications as the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Italian Studies, and Film, Fashion & Consumption. She is currently working on a monograph on the role of fashion in Italian and Italian American representations of organized crime. Cecilia Brioni  is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen. Her research focuses on representations of bodies, style, age, and gender in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian popular culture, with a particular attention to the social and cultural construction of youth. Her publications have examined the emergence of a mainstream youth culture in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, literary representations of 1990s subcultural youth in Bologna, and contemporary self-representations of Italian youth on YouTube. Her monograph Fashioning Italian Youth: Young People’s Style and Identity in Italian Popular Media, 1958–75 (Manchester University Press, 2023) won the 2023 American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize for First Book. Ylenia Caputo  is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, within the research project CELEBR-AGE (PRIN PNRR 2022). Her research focuses on media theory, celebrity cul- ture, and intergenerational studies. She is a teaching tutor for the Joint Master’s Degree Programme in Performing Arts and Audiovisual Production (University of Bologna/University of Salento). She serves as journal manager for ZoneModa Journal and as editorial assistant for Cinergie.  Il cinema e le altre arti. She is the author of the monograph Italian Gen Z Celebrity. L’analisi delle celebrità teen nella produzione audiovisiva italiana contemporanea (Mimesis, 2024). Paolo  Carelli  is Assistant Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where he teaches Media Theory and Media and Communication for International Tourism at the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures (in Milan and Brescia). As Senior Researcher at CeRTA— Research Centre on Television and Audiovisual Products—he published xvi  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS articles and essays on various topics in media studies, such as television history, the relationship between media and tourism, and international circulation of audiovisual content. He has co-edited the book Green Italy. Esperienze, media e culture per un turismo sostenibile (Vita e Pensiero, 2023). Chiara Checcaglini  is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities and International Studies. Her research interests revolve around contem- porary serial narratives from different perspectives. She has recently focused on girls’ representation in teen series, on different forms of distri- bution, reception, and audience practices. Among her publications are the chapters “When Medical Drama Meets Teen Drama. Youth and Mental Health in Italian TV Series,” in Stefania Antonioni and Marta Rocchi (eds.), Investigating Medical Drama TV Series: Approaches and Perspectives (2023) and “Girl to Girl: Italian Girls and Girlhood Models in Serial Narratives” (with Stefania Antonioni, Participations, 21:1, 2025). Gloria Dagnino  is Assistant Professor at the University of Udine (Italy), where she works on the AGE-C Ageing and Gender in European Cinema project, led by the Goethe University Frankfurt and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Before, she was a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at the Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland). She published articles and book chapters on political economy and gender perspectives of the contemporary Italian film industry and on media and marketing convergence. Her first monograph is Branded Entertainment and Cinema: The Marketisation of Italian Film (Routledge, 2020). Julia  Heim  is a lecturer of foreign language at the University of Pennsylvania. As a scholar who focuses on LGBTQIA+ representation in contemporary Italian media, they have recently authored “Italian LGBTQ representation in Transnational TV,” and the soon-to-be published “School Spaces and Subjecthood in Netflix’s Baby.” They are also co-edi- tor of Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media (Palgrave, 2024), a follow-up to Queering Italian Media (Lexington, 2020). In addition to research, they are an active Italian-English translator of theatre, art criti- cism, queer theory, and the children’s book series Geronimo Stilton. Danielle Hipkins  is Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published widely on gender and post-war Italian cinema, and is currently co-authoring Girlhood and the Italian Screen: A xvii  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  Girls’-Eye View of Italian Cinema and Television with Romana Andò, Maria Elena Alampi, and Leonardo Campagna. With Romana Andò she has also co-authored “Teen Identity, Affect and Sex in Rome: Italian teen girl audiences and the dissonant pleasures of Netflix’s underage prostitu- tion drama Baby,” Studi culturali, 2023, and “The Italian ‘Girlscape’: The Teen-Produced Video Essay as a ‘Material Thinking’ Audience Research Method,” Participations, 21.1, 2025. Fabien Landron  is Associate Professor in Italian Studies at the University of Corsica, where he teaches Italian language and culture and serves as director of studies. He conducts his research within UMR CNRS 6240 LISA, where he leads the interdisciplinary axis CITÀ – Intercultural Crises in the Anthropocene Era. He also co-leads several projects focused on rep- resentations of identity and popular culture in the Mediterranean. His research examines contemporary Italian cinema and television series, focusing on figures, movements, transnational circulation, and reception. He is also vice president of the Ajaccio Italian Film Festival. Kathleen LaPenta  is Senior Lecturer in Italian at Fordham University, where she teaches Italian and directs the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, an oral history project about Italians in the Bronx in the twen- tieth century. She is the author of several articles on modern Italy and its diasporas, and is currently at work on a book about Italians living abroad in the twentieth century. Qian Liu  is an assistant professor of Italian Studies at the Ohio State University. He is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics, and critical theory, with a specific focus on Italy’s transnational networks with the Global South. He is currently completing two monographs, Urban Exergue: Black Spectrality and the Poetics of Landscape and Foundations of Displacement: Aquatic Media and the Ethics of Witnessing. His articles have been published or forthcoming in Forum Italicum, California Italian Studies, Annali d’Italianisica, H-Net TransItalian Studies, and Altreitalie. Giancarlo  Lombardi  is Professor of Italian, French, Comparative Literature, and Film and Media Studies at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published extensively on European and North American women writers, Italian film and television studies, cultural studies, and European and American serial drama. He is the xviii  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS author of Rooms of One’s Own: Feminist Diary Fiction and the co-editor of Remembering Aldo Moro, Terrorism Italian Style, and Nuovo Cinema Politico. He is currently finishing a monograph on the rhetoric of fear in Italian television drama from the 1960s and 1970s: Belfagor e dintorni. Angela Maiello  is Senior Assistant Professor at the University of Calabria, where she teaches Television and Media Theory. She is Principal Investigator of the research project “Catastrophes of Southern Italy: Photogénie and Remediation of Natural Disasters (CAOS),” and she was a member of the research project “Archives of the South: Non-Fiction Cinema and the Southern Landscape in Italy, 1948–1968.” She has pub- lished L’archivio in rete (goWare, 2015), Gomorra—La Serie. La famiglia, il potere, lo sguardo del male (Edizioni Estemporanee, 2016), and Mondi in serie. L’epoca postmediale delle serie tv (Pellegrini, 2020), and several essays in edited books and journals. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Fata Morgana and Fata Morgana Web. Jonathan  Mullins  is Assistant Professor of Italian at Ohio State University. His main research areas are the history of the Italian left, the use and representation of the body, and the way media facilitate the cre- ation of mass, sub, and countercultures. His publications have appeared in The Italianist, Italian Studies, Journal of Romance Studies, and World Picture. Ellen  Nerenberg  is Hollis Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (University of Toronto Press, 2001), winner of the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association, and Murder Made in Italy: Homicide, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture (Indiana University Press, 2012). She is the co-editor of Writing Beyond Fascism: Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Cespedes (Fairleigh-Dickinson U P, 2000) and Body of State: A Nation Divided (Fairleigh- Dickinson University Press, 2012), which she also co-translated. A founding editor of g/s/i—Gender/ Sexuality/Italy, her research focuses on the intersection of crime studies and Italian Studies. Paolo Noto  is Associate Professor at the Università di Bologna, where he works in the field of film history and culture. His research is focused on Italian post-war cinema, genres, and film industry. Among his publications are Il cinema neorealista (Archetipolibri, 2010, with Francesco Pitassio), xix  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  Dal bozzetto ai generi. Il cinema italiano dei primi anni Cinquanta (Kaplan, 2011), and The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media (edited with S. Pesce, Routledge, 2016). He is the principal investigator of the research TRAFFIC—Tracing American and Foreign Funds in Italian Cinema (funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research). Catherine  O’Rawe  is Professor of Italian Film and Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of numerous publications on Italian film, acting, stardom, and popular culture, including The Non- Professional Actor: Italian Neorealist Cinema and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2025). She is the co-author of the books Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Film Studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy: Architecture, Innovation, Labour, Politics, 1930–60 (Bloomsbury, 2026), the latter based on the European Research Council-funded project at the University of Bristol. Ilaria A. De Pascalis  is Associate Professor at Roma Tre University. Her most recent research focuses on the configuration of subjectivities in con- temporary European and US film and series through the lens of gender studies and queer theory. Her research on contemporary European cin- ema in a transnational and postcolonial perspective produced the volume Il cinema europeo contemporaneo. Scenari transnazionali, immaginari glo- bali (Bulzoni, 2015). She is the co-editor-in-chief of the international journal of film and media studies Imago. Studi di cinema e media. She recently edited the collection Kathryn Bigelow (Marsilio, 2023) and co- edited the special issue Superfici, confini, formati. Le immagini contempo- ranee for Imago. Studi di cinema e media (2020), and with Veronica Pravadelli the special issue Global Digital Media and the Challenges of Care: Feminism, Ecology, and Public Health for the European Journal of Women’s Studies (2024). Daniel Paul  is an assistant professor of Italian and affiliated faculty for the Global Women’s Studies and International Cinema Studies pro- grammes at Brigham Young University, where he also serves as chair of the College of Humanities’ Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging committee. His research and teaching interests include gender studies, popular cul- ture, trauma theory, and Italian cinema and media studies. His most recent work has been published in Italian Studies (2024), the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (2024), and the edited volume Call Me by Your Name: Perspectives on the Film (2024). xx  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Gerardo  Pisacane  is an instructor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. He holds a PhD from the University of Oregon, where his dissertation Netflix: Phenomenology of the Teen Drama Genre in Italy explored how global television platforms such as Netflix have reformed the conventions of the teen drama genre—includ- ing plots, topics, character archetypes, and aesthetic forms—due to its transnational nature. An abstract of this work appears in the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. He also earned the New Media and Culture Certificate from the University of Oregon, and has co-authored LauraSpeaks: Remediations of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s ‘Risposte’ (Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 2019). His research focuses on Italian media, television, and digital culture. Ilaria Puliti  is an early career fellow and a sessional tutor at Warwick’s Film and Television Studies. She holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies (Warwick, 2024), with a thesis entitled Rural Modernities: The Politics and Aesthetics of Extra-Urban Experiences in Italian Cinema, which she is currently developing into a monograph. Her research inter- ests lie in cinematic representations of rurality and remote film locations and in how screen space negotiates meanings relating to environmental issues, global politics and film production. She has contributed articles on the films of Alice Rohrwacher (Cineforum) and chapters to the edited volumes Film Exhibition: The Italian Context and Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean. Since 2023, she has collaborated as an editor to Cinema e storia. Jacqueline  Reich  is Professor of Film, Television, and Media Arts at Marist University, and a member of the doctoral faculty at the University of Florence’s History of Art and Performance PhD programme (SAGAS). She is the author of The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2015), winner of the American Association for Italian Studies 2015 Best Book on Film/Media prize and a finalist for Best Book on Film from the Theatre Library Association, and Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is also a co-author, with Catherine O’Rawe, of Divi. La mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Donzelli, 2015). Her areas of expertise include star studies, film history, fashion studies, and Italian and Italian American cinema. xxi  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS  Dana Renga  is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the Ohio State University, where she serves as Dean of Arts and Humanities. She is the author of several publications on Italian film and television, mafia screen studies, and youth television, including the monographs Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave, 2019) and Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium (Toronto, 2013), the co-authored volume Internal Exile in Fascist Italy: History and Representation of ‘Confino’ (Manchester, 2019), and the edited volume Mafia Movies: A Reader, sec- ond edition (Toronto, 2019). She is working on a book called #Castingstardom in Contemporary Italian Television. Stefano Guerini Rocco  is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, where he works on the project WokeIt: Investigating Representation, Inclusivity and Social Responsibility in Rai’s Fiction Audiovisual Productions (PRIN 2022 PNRR). He is also adjunct profes- sor at the Catholic University of Milan and SAE Institute of Milan. His research interests include the production of media content for teen audi- ences across both cinema and television, with a focus on examining teen audiences and exploring inclusive narratives within these platforms. He took part in the research project CinCit–International Circulation of Italian Cinema (PRIN 2015) as a visiting researcher at the Università della Svizzera Italiana. He is a member of the editorial team of the journal SERIES. International Journal of TV Serial Narratives. Emiliano Rossi  holds a PhD in Cinema, Photography and Television at the Department of the Arts from the University of Bologna. He is cur- rently a postdoctoral research fellow in ATLas. Atlas of Local Televisions project (PRIN 2020). His main area of interest is television, framed on a historical, social, and productive level. He is responsible for the Organisation and Management of Multimedia Systems and Television and Web Television Laboratory at the University of Bologna, and also works as an adjunct professor at Padova and Udine Universities. He took part in several national and international conferences. He is the author of Schermi di trasporto. Storia, produzione, immaginari (Meltemi, 2023). He serves as journal manager of VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture. xxii  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Viola Amelia Santiloni  graduated in Italian Studies with a thesis on the radio and the theatre adaptation of Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi. She holds a PhD in Italian Linguistics, specializing in the language and dis- course of teen television series in Italy. Through postdoctoral research, she expanded her work in the field of media studies. She has authored schol- arly articles and presented her findings at international conferences. Much of her scholarly focus is on written and spoken Italian and offers insights into the evolving relationship between language and media. Anna  Sfardini  is Associate Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) in the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Department of Communication and Performing Arts. She teaches Intercultural Communication and Media and Research Methods on Media Production and Consumption. She coordinates the research activities of the CeRTA center. Her research explores media audiences, with particular interest in women’s television, children’s and teen audiovisual content, the impact of streaming services on consumption patterns, and the mediatization of politics. She has published extensively on these topics, and recently co- edited Dystopian Worlds Beyond Storytelling. Representations of Dehumanized Societies in Literature, Media, and Political Discourses: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Ibidem-Verlag, 2024). Enrico Zammarchi  is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Coastal Carolina University. He holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from the Ohio State University, where he wrote a dissertation on the history of hip-hop culture in Italy. He has published articles and book chapters on antifascism and neofascism in Italian hip-hop, second-generation Italian artists, as well as contempo- rary Italian postcolonial and giallo literature. Liao  Zhang  holds a PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Nottingham. Her PhD project explores the representation of girl’s culture and post-feminist sensibility in contemporary Chinese girl- hood films. Her research interests include (post)feminist media culture, women’s film history and film festivals, female celebrity studies, and trans- national audience reception of film and television. Her latest publication can be found in Transnational Screens and Celebrity Studies. In addition to her academic work, Liao also serves as the Lead Women’s Film Curator at UK-China Film Collab and Training Officer at MeCCSA PGN. xxiii  Notes on Contributors  Xiaoran  Zhang  currently works as Teaching Associate in Media and Screen Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he was awarded the Doctoral degree in Film and Television Studies. His research interests include streaming services, and consumption of film and television and global television. His recent works have appeared in Participation and Streaming and Screen Cultures Asia-Pacific (2022). 1© The Author(s) 2026 L. Barra et al. (eds.), Contemporary Italian Youth Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98064-0_1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Bringing Youth Into Contemporary Italian Television Luca Barra, Danielle Hipkins, Catherine O’Rawe, and Dana Renga The Transnational Growth of Youth Television Studies Writing twenty years ago in their introduction to an edited volume on teen TV, Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson commented that the field “has attracted very little academic attention,” observing that publications tended to focus on individual shows, rather than “teen TV as a genre or on the place of youth programming in the commodity culture of adolescents” (2004, 4). L. Barra (*) Dipartimento delle Arti, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: luca.barra@unibo.it D. Hipkins Department of Communications, Drama, Film and Television, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: D.E.Hipkins@exeter.ac.uk C. O’Rawe Department of Italian, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: C.G.ORawe@bristol.ac.uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/978-3-031-98064-0_1&domain=pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98064-0_1#DOI mailto:luca.barra@unibo.it mailto:D.E.Hipkins@exeter.ac.uk mailto:C.G.ORawe@bristol.ac.uk 2 Four years later Sharon Ross and Louisa Stein commented similarly on “a significant dearth of work on Teen TV” that they ascribed in part to a greater critical interest in teen film (2008, 11). Since then, scholarship on youth television has steadily increased in volume. In part, this is to do with an expansion of Cultural Studies methods that do more than cel- ebrate “pleasingly subversive aspects of adolescent behaviour” (Davis and Dickinson 2004, 4) but are also interested in what the mainstream itself has to offer. Equally importantly, it has become much easier to research and write about youth television because it is less ephemeral and indeed, thanks to the advent of streaming platforms, often apparently infinitely re- watchable (even though sudden disappearances from digital libraries can happen without warning). What might have appeared the phenomenon of a passing moment when Davis and Dickinson wrote of its “impermanence” can now be accessed and enjoyed by a whole new generation that finds its own meanings in old shows, and in an increasing “abundance” of new ones (Antoniazzi and Barra 2022b, 85). Above all, scholarship has grown because the production focus on youth TV, and the financial investment in its quality, have grown exponentially, shifting its original status from that of a commercially risky, niche genre to one of the leading forms of quality television production. While we continue often to use “teen” and “youth” television interchangeably, in the interests of inclusivity we have chosen the broader, umbrella term “youth television” for this collection, because it is no doubt the increasingly expansive idea of what constitutes youth that also accounts for a perceived and real growth in this area of production and scholarship, as youth or young adult protagonists stretch towards their thirties, and divisions between audiences’ age groups become less marked. Until recently, this growing attention to youth television has concen- trated on US products and audiences, with some forays into UK culture, largely because these two nations are associated with the origins of the genre and regarded as establishing its key forms: music-oriented televi- sion, and what we discuss here, serial teen drama. However, recent dra- matic changes in the landscape of youth television in a global context, ushered in by the advent of over-the-top services, de-emphasise the English language and target transnational audiences from the outset (Jenner 2021). In the wake of these changes, this volume belongs to a new D. Renga The Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: renga.1@osu.edu   L. BARRA ET AL. mailto:renga.1@osu.edu 3 wave of scholarship that focuses on non-Anglophone youth television and which challenges the historical preoccupation with the US/UK, empha- sising in this instance the energy and range of products relating to youth television in Italy. It is useful to begin by providing a brief overview of how this scholarship of the last two decades has narrated and analysed the dra- matic changes in the production and reception of youth television that have led us to this point. We can do this by examining the interrelated questions of who is “behind” youth TV (i.e. who has funded, produced, distributed or circulated it), why youth TV came into being, that is, who was it or is it for, and, last but not least, what that content is. Who Is “Behind” Youth TV? Scholarship on teen television has always paid attention to how it is pro- duced, partly because the tension between the commercial and pedagogi- cal imperatives of television broadcasting becomes particularly acute in relation to the emergence of teen audiences, poised as they are on the cusp of adulthood. On the one hand, in the US context in particular, indus- trial discourses were paramount, as teen television was born out of grow- ing awareness of newly emergent teen consumer power, particularly in the related fields of music and fashion. On the other hand, public service broadcasters in Europe (and some private channels in the US) have grap- pled with the possibilities of examining “social issues.” These distinctions do not necessarily produce wildly different products, particularly given the dominance of US teen models in the European media, and the fact that many of the “social issues” of adolescence, from rebellion to first rela- tionship experiences, have an intrinsic dramatic and commercial appeal. Asmar et al. also observe that the smaller channels in the US dedicated to teens, The WB Television Network (WB) and The United Paramount Network (UPN) were, thanks to their size, able to prioritise “ideals of liberal humanism and diversity, which implied first acknowledging the diverse social, cultural and political issues facing their viewers” (2024, 5). In the European context, the UK has led the way, first with Grange Hill (BBC; 1978–2008), and later Skins (E4; 2007–2013), in the production of “issue-based” youth drama. More recently, however, scholarship has emphasised how the arrival of streaming platforms has rapidly extended both ideological and commer- cial drives. Netflix in particular insists on its attention to representing diversity, demanded by younger generations educated in the politics of representation, as part of its strong commercial appeal. Although US teen 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  4 television has often enjoyed global distribution, the most relevant effect of the streamers has been to further blur national boundaries, and, most importantly for our study, to enable global audiences to access teen televi- sion made in a non-Anglophone context. According to Asmar et al. (2024, 4), among many others, Netflix has pushed teen television way beyond the limits of the national, able to diversify its offerings through “taste com- munities” that “cut across traditional boundaries” and “cater not only to (trans)national audiences but derive profit from content or genres that may not always be popular with (national) mass audiences yet resonate within a particular taste community.” Netflix’s aspirations towards the promotion of global citizenship have provoked a wide range of scholarly responses, interrogating the limits of its distribution claims, for example, the extent to which geo-blocking makes more progressive content inaccessible in certain countries (Lobato 2019), and more positive readings of its cosmopolitan aims (Liz 2024). In particular, there is debate about “Netflix” originals, productions made outside the US that mediate between dominant US models and “local tastes.” While Jenner (2021) has written that Netflix teen TV relies on a transnational grammar, strongly derived from US models, Asmar et  al. (2024, 10) argue that “Netflix’s teen original series, particularly when originating from non-US territories, negotiate their transnational nature by incorporating culturally proximate references (Straubhaar 2007) that can appeal to a (trans)national audience.” As we shall see in the Italian context, a further dimension to which critics are paying attention is the impact streamers can have on local creative economies and public service broadcasters, whether stimulating and supporting new products or over- whelming native systems. As Asmar et al. (2024, 13) write, they “put sig- nificant pressure on legacy media for which the teen genre is too often relegated either to a niche audience or considered an add-on to a pro- gramming geared toward older demographics.” The recent growth in the field of production studies has revealed the wide range of creative roles involved in teen television and the impact of their changing nature on content. Approaching a product that has para- doxically been labelled “teen” but produced by adults, critics ask what kinds of adults are they and how close are they to youth? Stefania Marghitu’s Teen TV (2021) includes a range of interviews with different creative figures, from the school teacher-turned-scriptwriter of the Canadian hit Degrassi (2002–2015) to the fashion advisor for Gossip Girl (2007–2012). The inclusion of these interviews is central to reminding us   L. BARRA ET AL. 5 of the complex interweaving of interests behind the creation of the shows. But what of young people themselves? The stars of teen television and how they have managed their subsequent careers have begun to attract more scholarly interest, from Degrassi’s Aubrey Jake Graham to Euphoria’s (2019–) Zendaya, as well as the most obvious (and often overlooked) aspects of their contribution as performers: their age. Susan Berridge and Tanya Horeck’s work (2021) on the importance of the intimacy co- ordinator, and Dana Renga’s work (2020) on the casting directors of My Brilliant Friend (2018–2024), for example, explore the growing impor- tance within the industry of protecting the interests of younger perform- ers, and paying closer attention to the politics of who is chosen to embody teens. The paradox of adults making TV for a generation that is experiencing a different world to the one they grew up in also generates increasing interest. Perhaps first evident in discussion of the creative duo behind Bristol-based Skins, a father and his twenty-something son, there is a growing preoccupation with involving teens themselves in the creation of the shows they watch. Enthusiasm for the attention that Skins paid to real- life teen issues is often associated with the celebrated approach of the mul- tiple re-made Norwegian series Skam (2015–2017, by public service broadcaster Nrk), which was based on real-life teen stories, investigated in a long phase of field research before writing. The process of involving teens in the script-writing process has led, in the Scandinavian context at least, to one agency dedicated to using teen focus groups and interviews as part of the creative process for television. These two examples underline how the genre, traditionally defined in the US, is being reconfigured from different national contexts. Why Youth TV? Davis and Dickinson argue that “‘the teenager’ developed as a recognised cultural identity in close synchronisation with the rise of television as a widely consumed domestic medium” (2004, 2). From the first recogni- tion of teenagers as a category (linked to a prolonged childhood in the relative economic ease of post-war USA), television has been seen as an intrinsic part of teen life—a means of belonging and socialising. While the forms that this television has taken have slowly evolved from teen inclu- sion in family shows, and the odd music show, to the abundance of the present day, scholarship has attempted to define the tone of these shows: 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  6 variously as ambiguous, utopian, ironic. In some respects, these readings of tone reflect changing ideas about the audiences that youth TV is trying to reach. Karen Lury (2001) first posited the idea that certain shows encourage both cynicism and enchantment because teens may not want to commit fully in front of their peer group to a single (and therefore socially dangerous) viewpoint. More recently, however, critics have picked up Jason Mittell’s emphasis (2015) on television’s narrative complexity to identify the critical positions offered by teen television: examples are Berridge’s illustration of narratives of violence against young women (2013), or Amy Shields Dobson and Akane Kanai’s reading of “affective dissonances” expressed through teen TV (2019). This shift reflects chang- ing ideas about teenagers, and perhaps their generational identities, with more conformist millennials opposed to the emergence of more anxious and issue-driven Gen Z. One further, and important, dimension of the growth of interest in teen television relates to the affective appeal of youth TV for adult audi- ences, in which Claire Birchall recognised a dimension of nostalgia: per- haps “a desire to revisit, to envisage a more articulate, more successful adolescence” (Davis and Dickinson 2004, 11). This is confirmed more recently in series such as Netflix’s Sex Education (2019–2023) or I Am Not Okay with This (2020), which “rely on a range of stylistic elements that appeal to adult nostalgia and the feeling of being taken back in time. Yet, it also attracts young viewers who discover or reimagine old(er) times” (Asmar et  al., 2024). Perhaps more important than this, however,  are rapid demographic and social change in the West leading to an extension of some of the key features of teen experience into one’s twenties and even thirties. If these include education, living with parents (a classic Italian stereotype), multiple romantic relationships, strong peer group friend- ships, and financial hardship, these well-worn features of teen television belong more properly to youth television beyond one’s teens. Youth audiences are changing in their habits as well as their representa- tional demands. Indeed, it is partly the growth in participatory culture that makes these demands evident and important in the first place, as we discuss further below. The rate of change, in particular the convergence of multiple media forms in the shape of the smartphone, makes earlier anxiet- ies about whether teens should be allowed a television set in their bed- room seem charmingly quaint (Davis and Dickinson 2004). There are many studies dedicated to the quantity of time that teens spend online, but despite all this technological change and its documentation, studies of   L. BARRA ET AL. 7 what teens actually do with their consumption of televisual or audiovi- sual narratives is still relatively limited, particularly in their transnational dimensions. Of particular interest in this regard is the project run out of King’s College London on the transnational dimension of youth viewing, which looked at the consumption of British screen  media in different European countries, including Italy (see Esser et al. 2025). What Is Youth TV (Content)? As the King’s College project suggests, much more complex configura- tions of the teen television experience are emerging, and slowly subverting the codified tropes of US teen experience that scholars suggest have domi- nated the genre. As Roz Kaveney memorably put it in 2006, “our imagi- nations have been colonised” (2006, 2). Until recently, it has been relatively easy to list the dominant preoccupations of teen content: the use of high school as a primary setting; generational rebellion; secrecy; peer group relations and the outsider narrative; first encounters with relation- ships and sex; and an emphasis on music and fashion. The most influential US products that determined these themes emerged in the early 1990s, with network shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 (1990–2000), Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003), later series in the multi-channel era such as The OC (2003–2007) and Gossip Girl, followed by Netflix productions that included Thirteen Reasons Why (2017–2020) and Stranger Things (2016–2025), and HBO quality products like Euphoria. This youth television has been defined by a marked preoccupation with gender identities. As Marghitu suggests, “Teen TV is a gender factory, much like high schools themselves, where the subject matter continually fixates on good and bad versions of masculinity and femininity” (Marghitu 2021, 5), but it has not been static. In particular, the teen TV heroines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), or Veronica Mars (2004–2007) addressed themes of class and gender exclusion at the height of postfemi- nism (Bolte 2008). These two shows also highlighted the hybridity of the teen genre often underlined by scholars (Ross and Stein 2008), since the relative stability of its themes permits it to diverge into fantasy, sci-fi or detective fiction with relative flexibility. With the marked increase in investment that Netflix and other stream- ers have been able to bring to youth TV, some scholars detect an ability to push the parameters of teen themes into new areas, moving beyond the school environment into alternate worlds; more diverse re-imagining of 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  8 myths and history; an appeal to nostalgia (Asmar et  al. 2024). These changes go hand in hand with collaborations with new contexts for teen TV, such as South Africa or Thailand. If, to date, the non-US examples that are able to make it into the critical “canon” of teen TV shows, such as Degrassi or Skins, are still Anglophone, there is a great deal of work to be done on the possible histories of teen TV that are only now beginning to come to attention, from Korean to Spanish to Turkish to, precisely, Italian. And these are not limited to Netflix. The sense of media abundance is primarily due to the ease with which new TV series can be sourced online, as fansubbing as well as streaming platforms’ greater willingness to dub (including into English), makes products accessible to different audiences. For example, Netflix’s default language settings now mean that the plat- form streams the dubbed versions of international programmes automati- cally, both increasing the offer to audiences and providing new challenges for viewers around identifying the exact national specificity of series they are watching (see Sánchez-Mompeán 2020, 182). One of the most important ways in which this new television has adapted to address Gen Z is through the hotly debated question of diver- sity, which has slowly increased the range of youth identities represented (Marghitu 2021, 142). In particular increasingly diverse depictions of sex, tackled in Netflix “originals” like Sex Education and Italian series  Baby (2018–2020), are leading some scholars to conclude that “coming-of-age narratives about teen sexuality have become a genre in their own right” (Herszberg and Ziemniak, 2021), provoking interest among those inter- ested in sex education (Potvain et  al. 2024). However, as Schumacher (2024, 353) argues, what we see is “the move from an approach to teen sexuality that was based on teaching ‘good’ behavior to one in which TV creators rely upon notions of quality that allow for (or as these creators often argue, require) a more explicit take on teen sex and one that depicts a wider range of sex and sexuality than seen in the past.” This expansion and curiosity extends to questions about gender and gender fluidity that first surfaced in Degrassi, and were recently more fully explored in Euphoria, and in Italy in teen series such as We Are Who We Are (2020) and Prisma (2022–2024). Racial diversity is also finally being addressed. After the Black-led shows Sister, Sister (1994–1999) and Moesha (1996–2001), US programming saw a huge gap in Black representation. Only Skins offered a rare treatment of immigrant experience until the more recent emergence of shows like Never Have I Ever (2020–2023). However, immigration is now gathering more attention in a series of   L. BARRA ET AL. 9 transnational productions and consumption like Skam and in the Spanish series Elite (2018–2024), both featuring Muslim female protagonists, and we discuss later in this introductory chapter the presence and experience of Black actors in Italy. Another important change lies in “the visualisation of online culture” (Jenner 2021, 195)—if convergence culture has changed the way young people watch television, television itself has had to take social media into account, showing how it shapes the daily lives of young people. In all of this, moreover, it is worth remembering that if we define youth television as what we imagine teens and young people watch and enjoy watching, then what constitutes “Youth TV” can also include a much broader range of genres and television types. As Ross and Stein observe, “teens and teen themes are represented on television beyond the televisual spaces distinctly named (or overtly branded) as teen. For example, programming on sub- scription networks such as HBO often features teen characters and teen issues, engaging with ideas of teen culture and teen identity while situating these teen characters within multigenerational family or pseudo-family contexts. Six Feet Under (2001–2005), Queer as Folk (2000–2005), Big Love (2006–2011), and The Sopranos (1999–2007) are all examples of this type of programming” (Ross and Stein, 2008, 5). Outside the US, where historically the risks of appealing to a niche market such as teens were much higher, this aspect of teen inclusion has an important history. It is one that may connote more conservative storylines, however, in which teens conform to parental rather than peer ideologies (Marghitu 2021, 72). In the interests of contributing to a much broader and longer view of global youth television that takes some of these distinctions and this rap- idly changing landscape into account, we will now discuss how some of the general issues mapped out here take a specific shape in the contempo- rary Italian audiovisual context. The Impact of Production and Industry Changes on Italian Youth Television Mapping the evolution of contemporary Italian youth television inevitably means tracing some profound changes that have taken place in the Italian audiovisual industry and media system over the last two decades. The mar- ket has become increasingly inclusive of different, specific audiences, like teenagers and young adults, and increasingly interested in relationships 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  10 with major global players, who act as production companies or commis- sioners, defining international distribution or co-productions. Teen drama is often a result of these changes, and sometimes anticipates them, devel- oping models that are later exploited elsewhere. After a rich and complex period since the mid-2010s, ambitions have only been partially realised, a lot of promise has remained unfulfilled, and many attempts have proved to be illusory. Nevertheless, it is also undeniable that youth television man- aged to find its own sphere and to inspire other series, thanks to the care- ful construction of a sector that did not exist before (in the industry, in the imagination and creativity of the auteurs, in the expectations and habits of the audience), and that must now be reckoned with. For many decades, the production of original Italian television series was an exclusive task of public broadcasting (and especially its flagship channel Raiuno) and then of the main commercial network, Canale 5 (part of the Mediaset group). In both cases, the guiding principle was that of “least objectionable programming,” choosing themes, settings and characters that could appeal to a wide, mainstream audience, without any elements that could be criticised from a social, cultural or political point of view (Barra and Scaglioni 2015). Then Sky, the main pay-television opera- tor, changed the production landscape, broadening its perspectives and refining its standards, inspired by US quality television. In 2007, it started a complementary and distinctive original series production for its pre- mium audience. Sky Italia offered an alternative to Rai and Mediaset series, due to its high investment and branding: “if it works for Mediaset and Rai, it ain’t good for Sky” stated the slogan used by Sky commission- ers to find the most suitable projects (Scaglioni and Barra 2013a). In par- allel with many other European countries (Barra and Scaglioni 2021), premium series paid a greater attention to writing and visual style, differ- entiated the themes and locations involved, as well as writers and actors, and increasingly developed the exportability of “made in Italy” titles: examples are Gomorra—La serie (Gomorrah, 2014–2021; see Renga 2016) or The Young Pope (2016; see Barra 2020). The arrival of on- demand platforms, both global ones like Netflix and national ones like RaiPlay, later consolidated the idea of the TV series as a legitimate cultural and artistic object, raising production values, with collateral effects on public service and commercial TV productions too. In parallel with these systemic (both Italian and global) changes in pro- duction and distribution, a brand-new space has been created for a genre that had previously only had occasional manifestations: teen drama.   L. BARRA ET AL. 11 Throughout the history of Italian television (Barra et  al.  2024b), the established genre was the “family comedy” which, among other things, also included storylines specifically designed to attract younger audiences (Barra and Penati 2011), thanks to specific characters and actors, in a reas- suring framework with a relaxed pace, light tone, and strong education and values (Buonanno 2012; Cardini 2004). Highly successful titles such as Un medico in famiglia/Doctor in the Family (1998–2016) on Raiuno, I Cesaroni/The Cesaronis (2006–2014) on Canale 5, and Tutti pazzi per amore/There’s Something About Love (2008–2012) on Raiuno (see Barra 2010; Lombardi 2012; Sampietro 2013) strongly emphasised genera- tional storylines, following the model of US teen dramas, inserted into quite traditional family narratives. Some examples show a major focus on teen characters, but always taking into account a parallel need for relevant “grown-up” narratives, as in the case of Rai’s Compagni di scuola/School Friends (2001) and Braccialetti rossi/Red Bracelets (2014–2016) and Canale 5’s I liceali  /The High School Students (2008–2011). While Sky always preferred to focus on more controversial takes on crime drama and auteur storytelling, on-demand digital platforms for the first time, through trial and error, built a space that was finally large enough for a true Italian- style teen drama. On the one hand, platforms identified new audiences and offered them different ways to access content; on the other, they trig- gered a moment of great creativity, with the ambition of charting new and lasting paths. We can roughly divide the recent evolution of teen drama and youth television on Italian TV—as well as that part of Italian television series production that is able to circulate abroad—into five main moments, often connected and sometimes overlapping, influenced by and at the same time capable of influencing the surrounding industrial-serial context. A Short History in Five Steps The first step was the Italian adaptation of in 2018 the Norwegian scripted format Skam, produced by Cross Productions and showrunner Ludovico Bessegato, who was involved in writing and directing almost all the sea- sons. On the one hand, the series largely follows the original model, with in-depth research into teenagers’ ideas and daily experiences, stories told from the main character’s point of view, the breakdown of the narrative into synchronised timeframes, and a careful construction of audience engagement (Rustad 2018; Andersen and Sundet 2019; Sundet 2020). On the other hand, Skam Italia adapts both the narrative and the 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  12 production and distribution models to the needs of a different target con- text, moving the story to Rome, taking into account cultural and social specificity, shaping the characters in different ways, swapping the order of the seasons, and slowly emancipating itself from the original text to create entirely original narratives (Antonioni et al. 2021). In 2018 and 2019, the first three seasons were distributed by a digital audiovisual platform, TIMvision, owned by the Italian telephone and Internet operator TIM; access was initially free and then paywalled, promotion was limited, and the series gained recognition mainly through word of mouth among fan communities. However, it soon became clear that the investment was far bigger than the results, and production halted before moving to Netflix in 2020 and for subsequent seasons. The move made it much more popular with a wider and more diverse young audience, but at the expense of many distribution innovations (the live scheduling of fragments was lost, as was all the additional transmedia narrative). The show’s widespread, enduring success was therefore achieved through many compromises and “normalisations.” Netflix was also at the centre of a second phase of the genre’s evolution in Italy, intertwined with the first. In Italy, too, the consolidation of on- demand operators was based, from the outset, on original productions modelled on the expectations and needs of local audiences (Barra 2017). Teen series played a leading, decisive role in the positioning of such brands, stimulating subscriptions and emerging as one of the main drivers for attracting young, otherwise neglected audiences (D’Arma et  al. 2021; Esser et al. 2024, 2025). It is no coincidence that Netflix’s second Italian original was the shocking teen drama Baby, followed by many other titles in the young adult and coming-of-age genres (Barra 2023)—for example, Summertime, which sets its story on the Romagna Riviera in the full light of summer love, with some original casting choices (Marinello 2024). Both the production histories of Baby and Summertime testify to a some- what late arrival in the teen genre, with many changes in both the narrative and the writing teams: the former began as a dramatic transposition of a news story, the latter as an adaptation of a successful novel. Productions such as these are evidence of an initial phase in which global digital plat- forms, through trial and error, seek to align their original production lines, to identify stories that can easily circulate around the world, and to launch titles that allow them to present and represent themselves as innovators on the creative, narrative, and industrial fronts.   L. BARRA ET AL. 13 A third step in this schematic reconstruction of inevitably parallel events—if only because of the long time it takes to create, prepare and package a television series—is linked to a growing push for diversity, with increasing attention to themes, settings, socio-cultural topics and political identities able to offer a new cross-section of contemporary society: par- ticularly on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, and with a broadening of the physicality and ethnicity represented by emerging Italian actors (Barra and Pitassio 2021; Barra, Formenti et al. 2024a). As in many other countries, youth television is strongly intertwined with an open, progressive, emancipated outlook, allowing for representations and expressions very different from the limited ones favoured by mainstream channels. Premium platforms thus broaden the variety of subjects and themes, branding themselves as innovators. While Skam Italia, Baby and Summertime already stood out for their storylines’ attention to diversity and realistic portrayal of contemporary affectivity and sexuality, other titles have also pushed the boundaries here. This is the case of We Are Who We Are, the series by Luca Guadagnino for Sky Italia, which, at least in its intentions, acts as a narrative and thematic link between US sensibilities and Italian settings; or a series like Zero, again for Netflix, a supernatural young adult narrative that for the first time put second-generation Italians at the centre (and involved them in the writing). A fourth phase, which continues this clear trajectory but also begins to reveal its limitations, is well illustrated by the case of Prisma. On the one hand, creatively and productively, the series acts as a synthesis of previous phases: it is one of the first original Italian series on Amazon Prime Video, which aims to position itself alongside competing platforms for younger audiences; it is the authorial project of the screenwriter and director who already created the Italian adaptation of Skam; and it is a story that places diversity, in its many forms, at the narrative centre, emphasising adoles- cence as a phase of great fluidity. On the other hand, its production and distribution history—with a first season that was heavily promoted but went relatively unnoticed, with reduced ambitions and budgets for a sec- ond season, and with a significant, and highly discussed interruption due to limited interest, jeopardising the sustainability of the project—testifies to a change on the part of digital platforms in their mature industrial phase, seeking further expansion to a wider and more mainstream audi- ence, and with an obligation to balance the books. The same contradiction between the objectives of expanding audiences, themes and narrative nuances, and the need to keep costs down, can be found at RaiPlay, the 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  14 on-demand platform of the public service broadcaster, which incorporates different points of view, but with modest recognition and increasingly tight budgets. In the fifth, current phase, there has been a marked slowdown in the quantity, variety and ambition of teen drama projects on Italian on- demand digital platforms, which have been either scrapped altogether or reduced to more sporadic and minor instances. In contrast, stories about teenagers and young people are predominantly included in narratives designed and shaped to appeal to multiple age groups. The public broad- caster Rai has absorbed many current innovations (Cardini and Brembilla 2024), and achieved two major successes, one more targeted and the other broader and cross-cutting, in Mare fuori/The Sea Beyond (2020–) and Un professore/A Professor (2021–), with stories that link traditional Italian generalist fiction and the new wave of digital teen drama. Proof of this is their simultaneous distribution on linear networks (such as Raidue and Raiuno) and on the digital platform RaiPlay, as well as their subse- quent release on Netflix, able to give the titles a new lustre and attract new audiences (Barra and Rossi 2026). Meanwhile, Netflix itself reinterpreted the literary classic Il Gattopardo/The Leopard (2025) in a teenage key. The brief alternative trajectory of Italian teen drama is thus now linked to longer-term historical trends, with a forced return to mainstream audi- ences as well as teen ones, which is also a way to go back to its origins, when the youth dimension was limited to a few storylines inside broader, multiple stories. Big Ambitions and Difficult Challenges From an industrial and production point of view, the history of Italian youth television over the course of about a decade reveals how ambitions, changes and hopes have slowly collided with the economic needs of the changing local media system (and beyond), which needs to relate to an increasingly elusive audience. First, the proliferation of premium channels and (global and national) on-demand platforms seemed to be an impor- tant step in expanding and diversifying the television audience beyond the mainstream, bringing back to the small screen valuable viewers who had slowly drifted away. Here, the teenage and young adult audience was a difficult but crucial piece of the puzzle. While this operation has undoubt- edly been successful, at least in part, with some strong titles, it has also become clear that these audiences are not large enough to make the   L. BARRA ET AL. 15 productions targeted at them truly sustainable, in strictly economic terms, as well as in terms of their broader promotional and discursive significance: the large amounts of money invested are almost never matched by a sig- nificant increase in subscribers, or in the number of viewers who faithfully and continuously watch the series. In Italy, the youth audience is simply not large enough to justify a dedicated investment. It is in fact not easy to trace, due to the fragmented viewing data available (for linear broadcast- ers) and to the absence of third-party, complete data (for streaming plat- forms) how much of the audience of a given series is actually composed of young viewers. However, it is clear that platforms and linear broadcasters have invested extensively in chasing the younger spectator. Second, to compensate for the limited young audiences in specific mar- kets, the development and evolution of teen drama on Italian networks and platforms has been accompanied by the desire to target an audience that goes beyond national borders, and to include other countries and markets. Many titles had the ambition to circulate elsewhere, across Europe, in the United States, in Latin America and beyond, just as foreign teen dramas are indeed capable of circulating between many different countries (given the success of French or Spanish series, this is not just a UK–US trajectory linking US or UK series to the world). The idea of add- ing a local, diverse and authentic flavour to the universal narrative engine of teen drama as a genre has sometimes been an effective distribution driver; yet series that are already adaptations of global scripted formats make this kind of journey impossible, and more generally, the pattern can- not automatically apply to all productions. Sensitivity to issues of ethnic or gender diversity has proven to be an effective promotional driver, but one limited to niche fandoms rather than broad youth audiences. In short, it may be neither desirable nor feasible to appeal at the same time to young people in a country like Italy and to many other young people elsewhere. In addition, Italian teen drama has grown and branched out due to the production and distribution methods of premium networks and global digital platforms, which have explicitly positioned themselves as an alter- native to the usual, tired mechanisms of national audiovisual industries: a revolution, a disruption, a desire to take greater account of the wishes of users-subscribers (and their data), to make access to content easy, and to broaden representation. While in the early stages of their evolution, global digital players did indeed deliver on their promises to make it easier to enter new markets and present themselves as something new, a subsequent necessary consolidation (both in single national markets, and globally) led 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  16 to a sort of “reinvention of the wheel” (Barra 2023b), a return to tradi- tional mechanisms that actually work: the outcome was a reduction in quantity, the addition of advertising, and the desire to involve the broader, more traditional audience in expensive original productions. The current production and distribution scenario is therefore one of a return to order, closing a particularly rich and creative phase. A contrac- tion of budgets has led to a reduction in the quantity and quality of the offer, while a new generation of teenage audiences is emerging, different from the ones that grew up with Skam, Summertime and Prisma: they jumped on Un professore and Mare fuori and are now looking for some- thing else. A different balance is being found, where the inclusion of new inputs, consolidated in this moment of abundant creativity, in the “old bottles” of mainstream series, is accompanied by small-scale, and often publicly funded areas of further innovation. Young TV Actors and Stardom in Italy Two closely related fields affected by these recent, dramatic changes in the youth television industry in Italy are the experience of television youth performers and fandom practices. Since both these shifts are central to this collection, some further background on actors and fandom is provided here, before looking at our individual contributions in more depth. Before the rise of so-called “prestige television,” television acting was perceived somewhat pejoratively: due to the lesser status of television as opposed to film performance, in actors’ résumés, TV was often treated as the “poor relation” (Barra 2021, 272). The proximity and familiarity engendered by TV and its place in the home has meant that, traditionally, “domesticity and ordinariness are hallmarks of the television star” (Leppert 2020, 497). The rise of streaming television, on the back of the 1990s emergence of the “quality television” model associated in the US with HBO, has seen the migration of leading film stars to television work (Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Al Pacino, among many others). In Italy, the emergence of the “Sky model” of quality seriality in the 2000s (Scaglioni and Barra 2013b, 11–12), represented by series such as Romanzo criminale (2008–2010), Gomorrah, and Suburra—La serie/ Suburra: Blood on Rome (2017–2020) among many others, saw different actors achieve prominence. From the “cult” appeal of the relatively unknown male actors of Romanzo criminale, to the mainstream success of Alessandro Borghi of Suburra, a masculine model of quality TV stardom   L. BARRA ET AL. 17 developed, oriented around crime dramas. The arrival of Netflix in Italy in 2015 and the growth of premium TV outlets and on-demand platforms has seen a consequent “intensification of the demand for content [that] has led to a greater demand for actors to be cast in serial products aimed at a ‘teen’ audience” (Vacirca 2024, 405). Series like Baby, Skam Italia and Summertime have enhanced the profile of actors such as Benedetta Porcaroli, Ludovica Martino and Ludovico Tersigni, while bringing to the spotlight new stars like Coco Rebecca Edogamhe and Alice Pagani. This has now led to an “unprecedented hybridity of actors between film and TV production” (Barra, Formenti, Pitassio 2024a, 6). Working outside of the crime genre, these series present on Italian screens characters who are more realistic and more imperfect than the Rai model of youth seen in series such as La compagnia del cigno/The Swan Company (2019–2021). It is important to note that most of these actors become national stars only, rarely working outside of Italy, and certainly, as is consistent with Italian stars in general, not gaining a substantial inter- national profile. The case of Simona Tabasco, who went from Rai medical drama Doc—Nelle tue mani/Doc—In Your Hands to an Emmy nomina- tion for her role in season two of The White Lotus (2023), is quite isolated, although Salvatore Esposito, who played mafioso Genny in Gomorrah also received critical acclaim for his role in Fargo (2020). In addition, Silvia Vacirca (2024, 409) notes that young Italian actors try to construct an image that is consistent with a “prestige” perspective, with work for Rai or Mediaset television series tending to be looked down upon. However, the runaway success of Rai’s series Mare fuori has pro- duced new young stars for a broadcaster more traditionally associated with older audiences and genres such as celebratory biopics, social commitment and comedy (Barra and Scaglioni 2015, 67). Indeed, the fourth season of Mare fuori was presented at the Rome Film Festival in October 2023, demonstrating how the series has attained a “cinematic” prestige not tra- ditionally associated with a public service production. The casting processes of recent youth-oriented television series are var- ied, but recent years have seen a growth in the recruitment of non-actors for these productions. As Vacirca notes, “the greater demand of young actors for ‘teen’ products forces the film and television industry to street- cast their performers” (2024, 397). The casting of the first season of the HBO/Rai co-production L’amica geniale/My Brilliant Friend saw cast- ing directors Laura Muccino and Sara Casani audition 9000 children for the lead roles (Renga 2020). This exhaustive practice of local casting 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  18 seeking out new faces has extended to other series, such as the casting of Mare fuori, managed by RC Casting, which has involved hundreds of cast- ing calls in Naples and Campania. The eventual cast comprised non-actors such as Maria Esposito and the more experienced Massimiliano Caiazzo, both of whom became breakout stars for their roles as star-crossed teen lovers in the Naples juvenile penitentiary. The rise of the casting director and the recognition of this figure as a “cultural producer” (Martin, quoted in Renga 2020, 87) who can create the right kind of authenticity for these series goes hand in hand with the rise of the acting coach. In recent years, the figure of the on-set acting coach working with child performers and non-professionals has become more common in Italy. For example, series such as Zero, Mare fuori, Curon, and Summertime have used acting coaches on set to work with their young non-actors; as Pierini (2024, 103–4) notes in her work on prolific coach Tatiana Lepore: “by migrating into serial production, the presence of the coach has fostered and at the same time supported a ‘teen trend’ of the market, taking care of the increasing presence of young actors.” Netflix’s Zero was the first Italian series to feature an almost entirely Black main cast, and for this, it was hailed as revolutionary; the main cast, like warehouse worker Giuseppe Dave Zeke, who was cast as the lead, attended open casting calls, or were scouted via street casting or attended auditions. One, Dylan Magon was a rapper; Haroun Fall, meanwhile, had trained at Italy’s prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, becoming the third Black acting student in the 86-year-long history of the school, while co-star Madior Fall was working as a model (see Vacirca 2022a). Netflix Italia, in particular, has been vocal about its desire for greater diversity and inclusivity in its products and in its teams: Eleonora Andreatta, VP of Italian content, said in 2023 that “the Italian branch of Netflix wants to represent the country’s richness of identity: a multicul- tural country, with centuries-old layers of culture, beauty, with the fer- ment of diversity and a heritage of traditions” (see Lulli 2023). While Zero attracted international attention because of its cast, its Black co- writer and co-creator Antonio Dikele Distefano pointed to the prevailing view that “there are no Black actors in Italy,” and the need to challenge this assumption (in Vivarelli 2021). Casting non-actors can be one way around this, and it is interesting that Summertime’s lead, Coco Rebecca Edogamhe, a non-actor who turned up to an open call audition, was   L. BARRA ET AL. 19 “blindcast,” as the role was not written as Black by the series’ all-white writing staff (Marinello 2024). These debates over representation increased in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, as seen in a 2021 Netflix-sponsored round- table featuring actors from Summertime and Zero. Also present was young actor Beatrice Bruschi, whose character on Skam Italia, Sana, gained great fan attention and popularity as a Muslim character of North African heri- tage. Bruschi, however, is white and non-Muslim. Bruschi admitted that this type of casting would not be acceptable in 2021, but said that when she was cast in 2018, no actors of colour auditioned for the role (Netflix Roundtable, 2021). Italy is clearly catching up with the kinds of debates that have dominated social media in the US context in particular, around the problematics of casting in relation to race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality, and this is reflected in the rise of talent agents who set out to represent a more diverse portfolio of acting clients, such as Queerky, “the inclusive talent agency,” or Wariboko, focused on Black Italian actors and models. Youth Series Fandoms in Italy Slightly earlier series such as Romanzo criminale and Gomorrah tended to attract a “cult” masculine fandom for their charismatic anti-heroes (see Renga 2019, 121–30). These fans interacted with the series through cre- ating fan videos and online content, and their parasocial relationships with actors and characters remediated the televisual texts in complicated and sometimes ethically problematic ways. As social media has evolved in the last ten years, the interaction between fans and the media products they consume has increased and diversified. Alongside fansubbing (fan- produced subtitles) for series such as Skam Italia (Antonioni et al. 2021, 446), we witness “the emotional engagement, the chance to share thoughts, personal feelings and experiences, the collaborative production of fan-art and fan-fiction” (442) for multiple series. Fan videos on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter show a high level of investment in characters and their relationships, often shipping pairings together. Popular examples are the pairing of Niccolò and Chiara from Baby, Martino-Niccolò and Edo- Eleonora from Skam Italia, and Carmine and Rosa from Mare fuori: the latter pairing became extremely popular with the release of the third sea- son of the series in 2023 and garnered its own hashtag on Twitter (#piecurosa). 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  20 While fans have tended to create their online productions around char- acters, rather than performers, because of the proximity felt to them through their placement in familiar Italian locations and situations (Andò and Hipkins 2022), there has, of course, been extensive interest in the stars of these productions. Some of this is intrusive, with actors being shipped together in a way that potentially makes them uncomfortable: the reaction of Massimiliano Caiazzo, who played Carmine in Mare fuori to social media accounts shipping him with his co-star Maria Esposito has been to seemingly distance himself from the series. Likewise, Q+As on Instagram in 2023 hosted by series director Ivan Silvestrini often resulted in him having to ask fans to leave the actors alone; Silvestrini also discussed how he tried through his posts to interest fans in the actors with the hope of lessening their devotion to ethically problematic characters such as mafioso Ciro Ricci (see Costabile 2024). He also frequently urged fans to be respectful of the actors’ space, and not to descend on the filming, as fan tourism for the series, which shoots in Naples at an Italian naval base, had become overwhelming by 2023 (Horowitz 2023). However, the same fan appeal has allowed star Maria Esposito to open her own bar in Naples city centre, promoted by herself and other stars of the series. The relationship between fans and series creators is sometimes conflic- tual: the example of Skam  Italia fans who successfully campaigned to secure a fourth season for their favourite series shows their power. However, as creator Ludovico Bessegato has noted, this vociferous fan- dom, which feels ownership of the production, can be a double-edged sword: “Twitter and the fandom give you a deeper, detailed idea of what they like and don’t like. However, you have to be careful because they are not representative of the whole audience. When it became clear that [char- acters] Eleonora and Edoardo would not be much present [in the fourth season], many people protested. [ …] You don’t have to be guided by fans, but you have to be able to use them” (quoted in Antonioni et al. 2021, 450–51). In a different key, while the casting of a Black Italian lead in Summertime had a positive response from Black viewers interviewed, responses on Twitter from international viewers were quite different by the series’ conclusion. Initial delight from African-American women on Twitter when the series was released turned to disappointment at the lack of a satisfactory romantic finale for the female protagonist, with ire directed at the showrunners and the writing team. Social media has proven to be a powerful promotional tool for young TV actors, both in enhancing their own profiles and those of their series,   L. BARRA ET AL. 21 and in promoting causes they are interested in, such as LGTBQ+ activism and women’s rights. Indeed, many are obliged by production companies to use social media to promote their series. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, actors from Skam were co-opted to pro- mote campaigns around staying at home and masking, leveraging their influence over a young demographic who were being scolded by the press for failing to obey COVID-19 regulations (Antoniazzi and Barra 2022a; Alampi 2022). The extensive use of social media platforms for self-promotion has fre- quently meant a blurring of categories, and today’s Gen Z stars possess, according to Caputo (2022, 86), a multi-faceted star image: they are simultaneously actors, influencers, and content creators. It is perhaps unsurprising that it is predominantly female celebrities who “deliberately foster parasociality with audience members in order to maintain ‘self-as brand’” (Usher, cited in Caputo 2022, 97). The deployment of social media platforms like Instagram allows celebrities like Alice Pagani to lever- age concepts of intimacy, authenticity, and relatability in ways that are tied with femininity (Vacirca 2022b, 109). These brands that become tied to young stars’ self-promotion are often Italian, cementing their status as national icons for a younger public: Pagani has promoted Armani, Benedetta Porcaroli Gucci, Matilda De Angelis Prada, Maserati and Fendi, and Ludovica Martino has repped Furla. Meanwhile, Massimiliano Caiazzo has been a brand ambassador for Fendi, while Nicolas Maupas has repped Bulgari and Armani. As opposed to these high-end brands, Mare fuori itself launched a tie-in with high-street brands Oviesse and B. Angel in 2024 (Martina and Tralli 2024), showing how series can con- nect to fans in both aspirational and relatable ways through fashion and branding. Plan of the Work The chapters that explore this rich and diverse field outlined above in more depth are organised into four sections. They progress from broader investigations of Italian youth TV trends to more focused examinations of individual series or industry professionals. The opening section “Trends” explores key issues shaping contemporary Italian youth television, with a focus on how Italian producers and outlets are adapting local practices in response to the import of transnational production models, and with an eye to international distribution networks. Meanwhile national public 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  22 service broadcasters such as Rai are also producing exciting original drama programming. Contributors explore the changing representation of young people, via fashion, place, music, and language, while also contextualising these developments historically and industrially. First, Fabien Landron considers the heritage of Summertime with regard to the transnational evolution of the filone giovanilistico (or youth-addressed cycle of films such as Tre metri sopra il cielo/Three Steps Over Heaven, 2004), examining how these films and series have created a particular form of screen star- dom. Serial TV teen fashion is the subject of Rebecca Bauman’s contribu- tion, which focuses on how attention paid to costume design in series such as Baby, We Are Who We Are, Zero, Summertime, and Skam offers nuanced visions of issues relating to gender, sexual identity, race and class. Enrico Zammarchi looks at a broad selection of contemporary youth series that premiered on Netflix, such as Zero and Generazione 56k, and explores how Netflix Italia negotiates several identities pertaining to Italian youth through its strategic selection of music. A teen sense of space is the topic of Paolo Carelli and Anna Sfardini’s contribution: they read the evolution of youth television from the early 2000s and identify four models through which Italian teen dramas relate to the places where the narratives unfold, from postcards of reality to deformed mirrors of it. The Rai public service broadcasting is the topic of the following two contributions: first, Stefania Antonioni and Chiara Checcaglini address how the increasing number of series targeting teenagers available on the RaiPlay platform helps attract youthful viewers while offering more dar- ing, experimental content, as seen in series such as Nudes and Mental. Then, Ylenia Caputo looks at programmes that premiered on Rai post-2015 and traces a pattern of teen-oriented television series that resemble international teen production models while also attracting younger viewers. Viola Amelia Santiloni’s chapter explores several youth TV series that premiered from the late 1980s through 2024 and adopts a corpus and textual linguistics methodology to scrutinise teen representa- tion on television by analysing core features of Italian teen speech. Luca Barra’s chapter closely follows the creative and production development of the Netflix Italia original teen dramas, highlighting the trial and error pro- cess and the complex yet fruitful relationship between local production companies and the global platform, while showing how the genre itself was being constantly defined and redefined. The final contribution to this section focuses on the representation of female adolescence within media culture. Romana Andò and Danielle Hipkins draw on over 70 interviews   L. BARRA ET AL. 23 with girls from across Italy and analyse how Italian TV products sit on a continuum of transnational teen media consumption and representations of femininity. The second section of the book, “Texts,” offers detailed readings of a wide range of Italian youth-oriented series, placing them within the con- temporary socio-cultural landscape. The first two chapters analyse the Italian version of the Skam franchise: Ilaria De Pascalis addresses its con- tribution to the national debate about toxic masculinity and gendered violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people; meanwhile, from a slightly different, but related perspective, Cecilia Brioni studies the series’ integration of social media use, showing how this works not just to evi- dence digital community-building within the series but also as a mode of articulation of gender and ethnic identity. Teen identity is also at the heart of Rai’s La compagnia del cigno, and Emiliano Rossi shows how the show’s combination of young performers—mostly first-timers—supported by more mature and distinctive actors, adds to its effective mix between real- ism and fiction, and drives its coming-of-age narrative. Turning to reception, the Italianness of the Rai and HBO prestige adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is intriguingly probed by Liao Zhang and Xiaoran Zhang. Their study of the Chinese reception of the series—via promotional materials and bullet screen viewer com- ments—reveals Chinese audiences’ perception of it as closer to Anglo- American content than to Italian. Within Italy, a different type of production, YouTube videos by the southern Italian group Casa Surace, have offered a commentary on a particular facet of Italian youth experi- ence: that of southern students moving to the north. Maria Elena Alampi’s chapter identifies the role of Casa Surace in redefining the image of the young southerner through a humorous approach, capable of reaching a large youth audience that Rai programming typically might not. This youth audience was, however, secured by the hit Rai series Mare fuori, since its first airing in 2020. The chapter by Catherine O’Rawe examines how the younger demographic addressed by the hit Naples-set series is now embedded in an extended transmedia universe of music, fashion, the- atre, and tourism. These offshoots represent modes of both transmedia storytelling and promotion, and invite commentary on the possibilities for Rai of this highly engaged younger audience. Our third section, “Close-ups,” offers more focussed readings of Italian youth TV series, drawing on a wide range of methods and thematic angles, from immigration to emergent queer identities. By putting these shows 1  INTRODUCTION: BRINGING YOUTH INTO CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN…  24 under the magnifying glass, our contributors identify several rich veins running across these diverse dramas. The most powerful of these is Italy’s geography. “Destination Italy,” as Stephanie Malia Hom has defined Italy’s sense of its own touristic desirability (2015), shapes many shows that look towards a global audience, including the series Anna (2021), discussed by Gerardo Pisacane, which despite being a post-apocalyptic drama revels in presenting us with a spectacular Sicily. The process of glo- calisation that Pisacane discusses accounts in part for the significant roles that locations play in Italian teen drama, pleasing both international audi- ences with their glamour and local audiences with their specificity. With the fifth longest coastline in Europe, and a climate that favours spending teen leisure time outdoors and location shooting, it is little surprise to find storylines gravitating around Italy’s shorelines. If, as Daniel Paul suggests in relation to Summertime, the Italian beach can easily be coded as a het- eronormative space, erasing questions of race and queer identity from public space, on the other hand the queer potential of the shoreline as liminal space emerges with full force in We Are Who We Are, set on the edge of the Venetian lagoon. As Ilaria Puliti argues, the shoreline provides a suitably liminal space in this series to explore queer identities more openly, but also an opportunity to reflect on the environmental pollution in which media production itself is complicit. Jonathan Mullins highlights the series’ contrast between the hostile atmosphere of the US airbase and the teens navigating their queerness through hair, costume, and music, playing with the mutability of teen identity and pointing towards a future in a different time and space of Bologna. Indeed, Italy’s cities feature fre- quently as co-protagonists of its teen TV series. In his analysis of fantasy- inspired Zero, Qian Liu sees the radical possibility for teens to re-shape the Italian city, as the Black Italian teen hero’s superpowers reconfigure the time and space of Milan in pursuit of an Afro-Italian urban utopia. Demetrio Antolini argues instead that in the case of La vita bugiarda degli adulti/The Lying Life of Adults (2023), it is the city itself that shapes the coming-of-age of its female protagonist in a longstanding