This dissertation analyses American television series about high school, beginning with the emergence of high school TV as a distinct genre in the seventies, moving through its explosion in popularity and breadth in the nineties, and finishing with its continued relevance in the contemporary era of streaming TV. The dissertation argues that high school TV emerged as a response to the “failed revolution” of student protest in the 1960s, and reveals how popular media technology both responds to and transforms political desires. In the late sixties, youth-driven social movements sought to radically transform the structure of American society. From its inception, high school TV addressed the core concern of those movements: the fraught accommodation of young people to their roles in capitalist society. As high school TV became increasingly popular in subsequent decades, seeking out newly youthful audiences, it continued to explore the issues that defined the sixties: 1) the rise of school as the central institution of multiracial social reproduction, 2) the growth of a “new class” between the working class and the bourgeoisie, and 3) the social proximity of youth to racially and sexually minoritized underclasses. Shows such as Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979), Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990-2000), and Euphoria (2019-) all aimed to entertain. At the same time, they mirrored the writing of student activists, radical teachers, and militant theorists—but in a distorted form, envisioning youth autonomy in the absence of youth political power. The sixties may have ended with the movements’ most revolutionary dreams disappointed, but the dictate of television production—to create a product that new generations of young people will watch—results in a perpetual attention to the mechanism of class reproduction as it pertains to youth. In the wake of what historian Robert Brenner calls the “long downturn,” the setting of high school provides an apt institutional matrix that stages the vicissitudes of youth—autonomy and domination, labor and leisure—without guarantees about what lies on the other side.