Do you remember hearing about (or watching) those after school specials that used to run on network television? The ones that would interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to teach teenagers how to address socially relevant issues? The Tomorrow People seems to be The CW’s attempt to provide viewers with a similar experience, minus the in your face morality lesson.
The series premiere of The Tomorrow People has an underlying social commentary that you might not have been expecting when you tuned in. It doesn’t take away from the viewing experience, but it definitely leaves you with more than just an hour of witty banter like some shows are guilty of.
One of the more obvious of the ‘read between the lines’ issues is the idea of over-medicating kids. It’s becoming the band-aid that society uses to “handle” kids that don’t fall into the categories of so-called socially constructed norms. The protagonist in The Tomorrow People is a teenage boy name Stephen Jameson (Robbie Amell), who has been going through a rough time. Of course the solution, according to his therapist, is a cocktail of meds meant to help his mind function within acceptably normal parameters.
The problem is that all the unexplainable events that have led him to taking up semi-permanent residence on a Freud-like couch were a result of his genetic disposition to be special, or more aptly, one of the Tomorrow people. I’m not advocating for eliminating medicine for people that actually need it, but as it turns out, obviously Stephen doesn’t really need it.
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