In the beginning there was Scream. And Scream begat Kevin Williamson. And Williamson begat Scream 2, Dawson's Creek, and Katie Holmes. Which, in turn, begat an overwhelming flood of teen movies and TV shows and magazine covers. And — until now — it was good. But three years P.S. (post-Scream), strange things are afoot. In theaters, teen tantalizers like Melissa Joan Hart's Drive Me Crazy and Claire Danes' Brokedown Palace woefully underperformed. On the tube, NBC's Freaks and Geeks is a ratings loser, and Williamson's ABC drama Wasteland has pretty much lived up to its title in the Nielsens. Dare we say it? The teen boom is showing signs of age.
But don't worry: Hollywood abhors a vacuum. This fall a hot new demographic has emerged: women. Adult women. Women refreshingly far from puberty. ''To crib a line from Fatal Attraction,'' says Paul Dergarabedian of the box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, ''this is an audience that will not be ignored.''
Consider this: On TV, no less than three new dramas aimed at over-30 females — ABC's Once and Again and CBS' Judging Amy and Family Law — have landed in the top 20. At the box office, the biggest shocker of the season has been Ashley Judd's whack-your-husband movie Double Jeopardy, which has netted more than $80 million thus far. Almost as surprising, the Bruce Willis-Michelle Pfeiffer ''chick flick'' The Story of Us nearly beat the hugely hyped young-male thriller Fight Club, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton (the final tally: $9.7 million to $11 million).
Of course, it's not like teens suddenly up and vanished, and adult women spontaneously generated. Rather, it's a simple case of teen-market oversaturation coupled with a scarcity (until recently) of female-friendly entertainment.
''The [women's] audience has been there, but for a long time they have not been addressed,'' says Judging Amy exec producer Barbara Hall, who blames the situation partly on the lack of female producers. ''The minute women see something even remotely like what their own lives are like, they will come out in force.'' Echoes Anne Kenney, cocreator of Family Law: ''At the start of this season, it was 'Kids! Kids! Kids!' Now everyone is talking about older women.''
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