Dissertations and adulting: What are we watching?

Graduation, a pivotal moment in your life. It is the moment you wait for, the moment you plan for, the moment where you have no idea what is coming next. There are ways that you can prepare for life after graduation, you could look at internships, figure out where you might want to live. But, most importantly, you can avoid all of that and instead get lost in a TV show. The question arises: what should you be watching before you graduate? 

University is often labelled as the best years of our lives. Between the deadlines, nights out, and expensive coffees, it can be difficult to recognise the nostalgia while you are still living it. The best TV shows to watch at university are those that capture the feeling of being young, lost, and surrounded by the people who become your family. 

Fresh Meat moves the nostalgia into university itself. The Channel 4 comedy follows a group of students living together in a house share. Unlike the glossy version of student life often presented, Fresh Meat is interested in the awkward reality of becoming an adult before you are ready to be one. Portraying the uncomfortable realisation that university does not turn you into the person you thought you would become. The house becomes a temporary family, with its chaotic dynamics capturing one of the strangest things about university: you can spend three years living in close proximity to people you would have never met otherwise, only to realise that the routine you took for granted is about to disappear.

Off Campus season one follows music student Hannah and hockey captain Garrett as their convenient relationship develops into something more complicated. Alongside their romance are the familiar aspects of campus life: friendship groups, sport, parties, academic pressure, identity, and the looming anxiety of what comes next. What makes Off Campus interesting alongside older university shows is how directly it leans into the emotional intensity of being young, and while things are obviously heightened for television, the underlying concerns for the future, and questions around whether relationships will endure, are recognisable. 

In our generation we all know that the key to life is romanticising it to its fullest, so why not do that through the medium of television too?  

The Big Bang Theory illustrates how you do not need to leave your childhood interests behind in your late teens and early twenties, as well as giving a sense of hope that you will find your people. This is especially comforting to those students who feel as if they did not have the ‘typical uni experience’. The show offers this comforting knowledge through its fantastic sense of humour and its array of characters. However, it does not paint a picture of perfection. It carefully outlines the struggles of navigating your life as an adult. Take Penny as an example: she does not rely on men and starts a life on her own. What the show cleverly does is not shame Penny for not having a stable 9-5, six-figure lifestyle, but instead normalises it and makes its audience feel comfortable with this picture of normality and realism. 

Modern Family offers both a sense of nostalgia and an example of how you can thrive in your adult years. This show is a beautiful picture of family life and how you change as a person as you go through different stages of growing up. Alex and Hayley Dunphy are key examples of this. Both characters struggle to make a life for themselves after their high school and college years, portraying the realistic transition of life following university. The show makes us feel excited for what is to come, and makes us think about all of the different doors that the future offers us. 

The real nostalgia may not even be for university at all, but the feeling of having somewhere to go, people to see, and another year ahead of you. Graduation inevitably means leaving that behind. But television has a way of preserving it, allowing you to revisit the friendships and ridiculous moments long after you have handed in your dissertation.