Forget 'Outer Banks.' These Gen Z-ers just want to watch 'M*A*S*H*' and 'Gilmore Girls.'
When Marie let her niece, Brianna, pick the music for their car ride, she was surprised that the high schooler wanted to play a bunch of songs from Gilmore Girls, including its popular theme by Carole King . Given that the show premiered in 2000, more than a decade before the teenager was born, Marie was surprised.
Brianna, who is 14, says she likes the quaint series about a mother and daughter living in a quirky small town even more than Outer Banks , the sultry Netflix treasure-hunting drama aimed directly at her demographic. Brianna says she finds the teen shows made for her generation, with storylines so outrageous that they circle back to boring, “ridic” and would rather watch something cozy and “vintage.”
Nostalgia TV — that is, shows that were initially released more than 10 years ago — are more popular on streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video than nearly all of their shiny new programming. A 2025 Digital i Trend Report released in October found that series that began airing in the 2000s, like Grey's Anatomy, Supernatural and Gilmore Girls, have been viewed for far more hours than current crazes like Stranger Things or Wednesday. Grey’s Anatomy , for example, was viewed for about 3.5 billion hours between 2021 and 2025 versus Stranger Things , which clocked in at 1.7 billion viewing hours (certainly, the former’s voluminous 452+ episodes may have helped).
The reason why nostalgia TV is so popular might seem simple on the surface: These shows are familiar to longtime fans who just want to throw something on. But older shows from the 2000s and earlier are captivating members of Gen Z too. When I posted a TikTok in search of young fans of older TV shows, it received more than 900 comments.
Dozens of young viewers, whose last names are withheld so they could speak freely about their rabid fandoms, tell Yahoo they were introduced to these series by their relatives, and now return to them in search of comfort and a longing for a time they didn’t experience.
A TV show passed down like an heirloom
For nearly all of these young fans, their passion for older TV shows was passed down from their parents, like antiques or old stories — shared on couches at dinnertime and through worn DVD box sets.
Amanda, a 45-year-old who lives in Georgia, watches a lot of the same TV she always has, but now alongside her 13-year-old daughter, Elise, who prefers Gilmore Girls, Friends, I Love Lucy, Designing Women and Golden Girls to newer fare.
Elise is a bit of an old soul. She prefers DVDs to streaming and has a cellphone, but doesn’t use it much. This delights Amanda — she has been educating Elise in pop culture history. She quizzes her daughter on the older music they hear on the radio and the actors who pop up in the shows they watch together.
Revisiting Gilmore Girls with Elise has given her a new perspective on mother-daughter relationships and made her more sympathetic to Rory’s teenage mistakes. “It's not always perfect, and it's not always politically correct, but we talk about it,” Amanda says of the older shows the pair watches together. “To be able to go back and share this with my daughter is really special.”
