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" Keri Russell has called her suspenseful FX spy drama, The Americans, &amp;quot;a show that&amp;#039;s about a complicated marriage.&amp;quot; While each episode features enough botched kidnappings to give Tony Soprano heartburn, fans of the cult favorite relish the quiet moments between Elizabeth (Russell) and Phillip Jennings (Matthew Rhys). Unfortunately, a tertiary character interrupts most copasetic moments between the married KGB operatives: their Nancy Drew of a daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor). It&amp;#039;s not Paige&amp;#039;s fault that she&amp;#039;s so irksome. Her character, a chaste, turtleneck-wearing, suburban kid in the &amp;#039;80s, was conceived during an all-over lull in the American landscape of cool. And despite her constant meddling\u2014Hey, Paige? If you don&amp;#039;t want to see your parents having sex, don&amp;#039;t barrel, rhino style, into their bedroom\u2014the high-schooler isn&amp;#039;t malicious. Then why do we hate her so much? Related: Why Kerri Russell Makes The Perfect Cold-Blooded Killer Perhaps because she&amp;#039;s not the first TV daughter to take the wind out of our sails. There was Dana Brody\u2014a loathsome offspring of the handwringing, bad boy loving, incessant &amp;quot;Dad?&amp;quot; asking variety, whose sulky affect inspired a GQ article, an SNL skit, and a &amp;quot;Dana Brody on &amp;#039;Homeland&amp;#039; Is the Worst&amp;quot; listicle. (In fact, last year The Wire highlighted the similarities between Brody and Jennings.) In decades past, dead weight came in the form of Stephanie Tanner on Full House and Danielle Chase on My So-Called Life. Even Modern Family has middle daughter, Alex, to flatline her fun loving sibs. Much like the anti-Skyler White backlash that prompted the Breaking Bad actress to write an op-ed on the topic, it seems we&amp;#039;ve moved on from hating the meddling wife and refocused our collective ire on the meddling daughter. In the latest episode of The Americans, after it&amp;#039;s been revealed that Paige quit the girls&amp;#039; volleyball B-team (of course she didn&amp;#039;t make the A-team), she defends the decision by asking, incredulously, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not allowed to change??&amp;quot; Her parents, just so patently bored by their daughter&amp;#039;s so-called rebellion, don&amp;#039;t bother to hide their contempt. Phillip actually looks physically pained by his daughter&amp;#039;s presence.  Related: The Badass Women of &amp;#039;Game of Thrones&amp;#039; Ranked As the survivor of some very awkward, awkward years myself, I can tell you that showrrunners are not entirely off with their depiction. Had I been aware of my own teenaged awfulness, I may have taken note of my parents&amp;#039; withering glances, graying temples, or their ever-growing collection of boarding school pamphlets, but I was too busy cutting myself a new pair of shorty jorts and painting the knobs on my dresser with Hard Candy nail polish to notice. Yes, young women can be a nightmare, but why has the antagonistic, whiny, insecure teenage girl become a small screen staple? Everywhere I look, the so-called millennial attitude shift is present in television. Modern Family&amp;#039;s entire premise is that conventional family roles are obsolete. On Broad City, Alanna says it best when she declares, &amp;quot;Statistically, we&amp;#039;re headed toward an age where everybody&amp;#039;s gonna be, like, caramel and queer.&amp;quot; Melting pot media is no longer the exception to the rule. And yet, the mood killer in a training bra hasn&amp;#039;t changed in almost 30 years. (To be fair, The Americans is set in the &amp;#039;80s so if it weren&amp;#039;t for their zip codes, Stephanie Tanner and Paige Jennings could have been in the same brownie scouts troupe.) **Shudders at the thought.** Related: 21 Imaginary TV Couples We Wish Were Real After Anna Gunn&amp;#039;s New York Times essay, Morgan Saylor, the actress who portrays Dana Brody on Homeland, spoke out about whether the girl hate is predicated on gender roles: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know completely if it&amp;#039;s a sexism thing,&amp;quot; she told The Daily Beast. &amp;quot;I think a lot of characters get a lot of shit. Maybe women more than men, but...I&amp;#039;m not that offended by it. And therefore it&amp;#039;s not that big of a deal.&amp;quot; But maybe it should be. I understand that adult dramas have less of a responsibility to flesh out underage character arcs, but when Homeland needs Dana&amp;#039;s brother, Chris, to vamoose, he&amp;#039;s simply asked to leave the room; similarly, when The Americans has a scene that requires Paige&amp;#039;s brother, Henry, to be present, he&amp;#039;s tasked with tending to his neato telescope. The boys are not given the opportunity to be hated. But the girls are given cringe-inducing plotlines such as reading her older sister&amp;#039;s diary (My So-Called Life), making a lose-my-virginity timeline (Shameless), directly disobeying her parents in order to attend bible study (The Americans), manslaughter, suicide, and drug abuse (Homeland), grade-A, honor society nerdery (Modern Family), and annoying the crap out of her parents (every show, ever).  As I understand it (via a Time magazine article on the next generation of youngsters), millennials are largely confident, optimistic, and tolerant individuals. But where are these kiddos on TV? Who is the modern day Clarissa Darling, Lindsay Weir, or Punky Brewster? Saylor explained to The Daily Beast that out of the six writers on Homeland, five have children her age. According to Saylor, &amp;quot;Most of the writers are male and they get to write about that father-daughter relationship. Certain writers would even talk about how certain scenes remind them of their kids.&amp;quot; It would be easy to make a blanket statement here: Men can&amp;#039;t write dimensional roles for women\u2014especially young girls. But I think the problem is less about gender and more about the intergenerational purview. Can an older person really ever understand (or accurately remember?) what it&amp;#039;s like to be young? Part of what made ELLE&amp;#039;s May cover girl, Miley Cyrus, open up to writer Tavi Gevinson was the fact that they&amp;#039;re both children of the &amp;#039;90s. As a still-hip product of the &amp;#039;80s, my question is this: If the world is becoming caramel and queer why the hell are our TV teens still so vanilla and lame? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a14146/why-we-love-to-hate-tv-daughters/>