For Fans of The Breakfast Club

What separates The Breakfast Club from lesser teen films is its insistence that shame is structural. The characters are not acting badly because they are flawed; they are acting badly because their social environment demands it. Hughes makes the adults in the film almost entirely absent or useless, which is a deliberate formal choice: this is a world the kids have to figure out without rescue. That refusal to provide easy parental salvation puts it in a different category from most coming-of-age stories.

Paul Feig and Judd Apatow gave themselves eighteen episodes to do what Hughes compressed into 97 minutes, and the result is probably the most honest portrait of American adolescence ever put on television. Every character in Freaks and Geeks is recognizable from The Breakfast Club's universe: the overachiever terrified of slipping, the burnout who is smarter than anyone gives them credit for, the athlete performing toughness they do not feel. The cancellation after one season remains one of network television's great crimes.

Laurie Halse Anderson's novel covers the same territory The Breakfast Club approaches carefully and then retreats from: what happens to the person in the room who has a real secret, not a romantic one. Speak is bleaker and more specific, but it shares Hughes's core conviction that teenagers are capable of extraordinary interior complexity and deserve to be written at full human scale. The film adaptation starring Kristen Stewart is also worth your time.

Night School Studio built a radio-signal horror game and, almost by accident, made one of the sharpest portraits of teenage friendship and estrangement in any medium. The overlapping dialogue system in Oxenfree, where characters keep talking while you move and make choices, replicates the specific texture of how teenagers actually communicate: constantly interrupting, performing cool, revealing things sideways. It is the closest a game has come to the emotional register of a Hughes film.