Growing Up Sucks / Live-Action TV

Moments where Growing Up Sucks in Live-Action TV series.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer- this is the major theme of the second season, if not the series. Despite going to a high school above a Hellmouth, Buffy soon learns that being an adult and all it entails is even worse. She spends the better part of the sixth season wishing she were dead, and it's hard to blame her, given the world she lives in.
• The episode "The Son Also Rises" of Dinosaurs featured Robbie challenging his father for dominance. He discovered that adulthood came with a whole bunch of hassles, and his father agreed growing up wasn't worth it. The only thing that Earl considered worthwhile enough about adulthood to reclaim his mantle and responsibilities? Sex.
• One of the recurring minor themes of Freaks and Geeks.
• In the Undeclared episode "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs", Steven and his dad are talking. Steven asks why he needs a job, and Steven's father informs him that Growing Up Sucks.
• Community has a version of this, when Troy realizes that growing up means you're just as dumb as your younger self, but with more responsibilities.
  • Both Troy and Abed devote extraordinary amounts of time and energy to subverting this trope. After building and entering a blanket fort:
    Troy: You thinking what I'm thinking?
    Abed: We're too big for this, aren't we?
    Troy: (disappointed) Yeah...
    (beat)
    Troy: Bet if we went two pillows higher in the corner we could vault the ceiling, bump up the square footage. Make this a blanket fort for men.
• Apply some Fridge Logic to Power Rangers Turbo and you get this. Not too long after Tommy, Katherine, Tanya, and Adam graduate from high school, they pass the torch to T.J., Cassie, Ashley, and Carlos. The point was supposed to be, "You've done your duty, now go to better things." However, since they had the rug pulled out from under them pretty quickly by getting stripped of their powers, it made it look like turning 18 made them completely useless, a la Menudo.
• In Ressha Sentai ToQger, we have a partial example: imagination is the key to being able to see the Rainbow Line (the magical tracks the Rangers' train travels on) and resist the Shadow Line (the bad guys.) Naturally, cue the scenes of kids waving hello or goodbye to the Rangers while their parents have no idea of what they're seeing, or a child or group of children being the only ones not ensnared by the Monster of the Week's spell. However, there are children who don't have the imagination to see the Rangers' train come through due to bad things in their lives, and the ToQgers themselves are the ones with the most imagination, and they're teenagers (or not). So you have things only children can see because of an actual reason other than "it's a perk of childhood that magically, instantly switches off at a certain birthday," and that leads to there being a few kids who can't see it and a few adults who can.
• Epitomized in this monologue from Night Court: "I don't know what's real anymore. When I was young, my mother told me Santa Claus was real. But when I got older... she told me he wasn't. One book says Jesus is real; one book says he isn't. We're living in the greatest country in the world... and we're murdering each other in the streets. What did they expect when they made us believe in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny then gave us the nuclear bomb to play with. Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle is a lie like all the rest, the astronauts killed the man in the moon, growing up took care of the rest." Made sadder because the speaker is a friend of Harry's dad Buddy— and mentally ill (he spends most of the episode not talking at all).
• A recurring theme in Spaced; all the main characters are pretty immature and have difficulty accepting the fact that they're not kids anymore. Tim in particular seems to have something of a complex about it:
  Tim: We've potentially destroyed her faith in today's youth!
  [Everyone looks at him skeptically]
  Tim: [Sheepish] Young adults.
• Wizards of Waverly Place: By wizard tradition, only one of the Russo kids (the one who's found to be the most experienced) will get to keep their magic when they reach adulthood. So naturally, the idea that two of them will have to give up their powers upon reaching adulthood and subsequently engaging in a special challenge to determine who will get to keep their powers dangles over their heads in the background for the entire series...before ultimately both Alex and Justin manage to get the right to remain wizards as adults when the former wins the challenge and the latter gets selected by Professor Crumbs to take his place as the new headmaster of Wizard Tech.
• Kamen Rider Gaim has this as a major theme. The main character Kouta used to be a member of a team of street dancers, but "retired" in order to get a real job and prove to his older sister that he can take care of himself. Unfortunately at first he's not up on the idea, and quickly falls back in with his old friends while using his Rider powers for personal gain. Things start to change after he almost gets killed by another Rider, which sees him go through a 10-Minute Retirement before recovering and finally acting more responsible.
• Will Byers in Season 3 of Stranger Things. While the other members of The Party are all focused on getting girlfriends and moving on into the next chapter of their lives, Will is annoyed by their romantic lives and wants to keep playing D&D in Mike's basement. He starts to grow in the next season, including realizing he's gay.
• Odd Squad as a general series zig-zags this trope. The organization is staffed exclusively by kids (whose ages range from infancy to age 12) who view adults as useless at best and odd criminals at worst, and there is some semblance of Immortality at play with both Odd Squad Directors (who can live for millennia) and Oprah, as the Big O, having the ability to control her aging according to "Odd Beginnings: Part 2", aging up a few years before deciding that she doesn't like it. It was also revealed in an interview that Odd Squad agents are forced to leave the organization when they turn 13, a fact that is bolstered by such episodes as "Trading Places" where Olive is forced to turn in her badge due to her old partner aging her up 9 years with the aid of a gadget, so she's 21 instead of 12. Because of agents' collective mindset towards adults, it's safe to say that none of them want to grow up and believe that being an adult is worse than being a kid. At the same time, however, episodes like "The Potato Ultimato" treat growing up as a good thing, with Olive excitedly remarking how she's getting taller and being disappointed when she finds out that she isn't.
• Glee: In the very 1st Christmas special, A Very Glee Christmas, when Will finds the New Directions members on the verge of working to get their watches (in the case of the boys) and hair (in the case of the girls) prepared to be given away for the sake of the fundraiser being held to collect money for homeless children after failed prior attempts at getting said money causes them to start getting desperate, he ultimately manages to put a stop to their somewhat misguided 'Gift of the Magi' ploy by suggesting for them to sing carols to the adult staff members at McKinley High...whom he himself knows from personal experience to have it far worse than the students when it comes to being in desperate need of holiday cheer precisely as a result of having become adults. And to quote what he says in response to Santana initially dismissively saying the point of Gift of the Magi is that 'life sucks''...:
  Will: Actually, you're right. The first Christmas you remember having is the greatest day of your life. Your family's all together, there are loads of presents, cookies. The magic is alive and well. But before you know it, you grow up. Work and school and girlfriends take over and Christmas becomes more of an obligation, a reminder of what's lost instead of what's possible. And all of the trees and presents and even the mistletoe can't change that. And then when you get to my age... you're so desperate to get that magic back, you'd do anything to be able to feel how you did that first Christmas.