7 items
The WB's gentlest family drama: Reverend Eric Camden and his wife Annie raising seven kids in fictional Glen Oak, California. Every episode was a moral crossroads—dating, drugs, peer pressure, faith—and families watched it together. For a decade it was the show your parents approved of, and it made Jessica Biel a star.
The cheerleader who was also the chosen one. Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy Summers staked vampires over the Hellmouth beneath her high school, and the show's mix of monster-of-the-week horror, teen angst, and quippy dialogue made it a genre-defining WB touchstone.
The WB teen drama where impossibly articulate teenagers agonized over love and life in the seaside town of Capeside — and where the Dawson-versus-Pacey fight for Joey became one of the defining "who will she choose" debates of the era. Set to Paula Cole's "I Don't Want to Wait."
Alien teens hiding in plain sight in a New Mexico high school — sci-fi wrapped in teen romance, set around a kitschy diner where everything came doused in Tabasco. It only ran three seasons, but its fans mounted one of TV's most famous save-our-show campaigns, mailing bottles of hot sauce to the network.
![Video thumbnail — Smallville Official Opening Credits: Seasons 1-10 [1080p]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Iuqtz_9JMfc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Ten seasons of Clark Kent before the cape — a teenager learning to hide superpowers in small-town Kansas, one kryptonite freak-of-the-week at a time. It was The WB's biggest series debut ever, and its real long game was watching Clark and Lex Luthor's friendship curdle into destiny.
The show that made indie rock cool, gave us Chrismukkah, and turned Newport Beach into the center of the universe. Josh Schwartz's The O.C. launched a thousand emo haircuts and a meme that won't die.
A boarding-school show where the main draw was the tech. Zoey 101 ran four seasons on Nickelodeon and delivered the fantasy we all wanted: a beach-adjacent boarding school with PDA devices and its own sushi joint.