Why Gen Z Loves Sports Romance

These shows have all the love triangles and class struggles and outsider angst that have defined youthful romance tales since Jane Austen was writing them, capturing eternal adolescent fantasies (being desirable enough to have two people fighting over you) and fears (not measuring up to the rich kids) alike. Pretty appears to have sparked a mini-trend of siblings competing for the same crush, a trope that also pops up in Every Year After, Walter Boys, and Finding Her Edge. The fraught post-DEI-backlash politics of representation, especially for the most racially and ethnically diverse generation on record, are evident in the shows’ leads. Like Crew Girl’s Martineau, many are multiracial but play characters with vaguely defined backgrounds who live with either a single white parent or a white surrogate family. (New York magazine just spotlighted the “Wasian generation,” a long list of up-and-coming white and Asian stars, citing Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, Pretty’s Lola Tung, and XO, Kitty’s Anna Cathcart among other white and Asian stars.) Liberal and minority viewers get to see mixed-race families and romances, and a TV landscape that isn’t all white. The anti-”woke” crowd is spared identity politics, non-English dialogue, and often all other forms of cultural specificity. Savvy streamers avoid backlash from both sides.