Reception
David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun described the series as "Shakespeare Summer Lite, with some gender-bending and woodland trysts to go along with the star-crossed lovers." In comparing the series to another debut Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly found that "it at least avoids the unearned angst of the summer's other 15-year-olds-in-school show, Fox's hapless Opposite Sex". Harvard creative writing professor Jane Rosenzweig found that Young Americans "has a breadth of focus that's far more true to life than the so-called reality-based shows like MTV's Real World and CBS's summer hit Survivor."
Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said that the show presents as though the creator "looked at the blueprints of other WB shows and plucked out the elements that would give his series the best chance for success with the Gen Y set." After naming a checklist of elements of the show that are common to many shows on The WB, Owen says that it is admirable from a business standpoint to make a show in such a manner but that it is not very original. Owen concludes by calling Young Americans "mindless and cliched" but still "guilty summer fun." Michele Hewitson of The New Zealand Herald compared the show to the film Dead Poets Society and said that it is not often "an American television series manages to exceed all expectations - of utter awfulness."
Despite being a spin off of one of the most popular WB shows, Young Americans received low ratings throughout its summer run and was cancelled in August 2000. As of September 2010 Young Americans ranks 49th among unreleased TV shows on TVShowsOnDVD.com.
Read more about this topic: Young Americans (TV series)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)