Cult-TV Theme Watch: Students

A student is also known as a pupil, and for lack of a better term is a “learner,” one who seeks knowledge at schools, or later, at universities.

Students -- youngsters who represent tomorrow for better or worse have played crucial roles on cult-television series throughout the medium’s more than half-century history.

In Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964), for example, “The Changing of the Guard” tells the story of an old teacher  (Donald Pleasence) who is about to retire, but feels that he has wasted his adult life in teaching.  He feels he didn’t make a difference.  In the story’s touching denouement, the teacher learns the error of his ways, as his classroom fills with the spirits of all those people whose lives he has touched across the decades.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (1969 – 1973) featured a different kind of tale about students: “The Class of ’99.”  This story involves a professor (Vincent Price) quizzing an auditorium of students on final exam day.  His questions, however, are anything but usual, and his pupils, are, literally, a different breed.

The most famous cult-TV students may be those of the misbehaving variety, and specifically, the ones known as Sweathogs.  Welcome Back Kotter (1975 – 1979) featured a teacher, Mr. Kotter (Gabe Kaplan) in Brooklyn trying to set right the likes of Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta), Arnold Horshack (Ron Palillo), Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs), and Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes). 

In the 1980s, students were seen regularly in the class of Mr. Hinkley (William Katt) on The Greatest American Hero (1981 – 1983)  Two of those young pupils went on to have big careers in Hollywood: Faye Grant and Michael Pare.

In the 1990s, Chris Carter’s series’ The X-Files (1993 – 2002) and Millennium (1996 – 1999) frequently set stories of crime and supernatural horror in high school settings and featured students as central characters.

In The X-Files, “Die Hand Die Verletz” featured students bedeviled by a demonic teacher, and the third season episode “Syzygy” diagrammed the impact of planets (and astrology) on two “mean girls.”  Episodes of Millennium such as “19:19” and “Anamnesis” also explored student relationships and settings.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, high school became the central location for almost all popular cult-television programming, and so students have been featured heavily in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 – 2003), Roswell (1999 – 2002), Smallville (2001 – 2011),  Veronica Mars (2004 - 2007), The Vampire Diaries (2009 – present), and Teen Wolf (2011 – present).