The series is structured around a “before” and “after” storytelling device, first deployed in the show’s opening moments: A catastrophic car crash looms, and the show counts the days leading up to it and the days that come after . Though the crash is the turning point of the story, it doesn’t come until quite late in the season, which feels like a lot of “before.” Though I guess that’s how befores often feel.

Alaska is special, because girls in stories like this are always special. She’s a wannabe Rayanne Graff with a book collection, the girl who feels more and needs more and has more secrets, who’s “bad” but in the best ways, who knows things about sex and alcohol. The volatility is part of the draw.

“You don’t sound like you’re in high school,” a mumbly liquor store clerk tells Alaska, who thinks she is acting cool but is actually acting annoying.

“That, Gus, is the whole point,” she replies.

It’s the point of lots of teen shows, and lots of the actual lives of teens, this desire to be older, freer, smarter, worldlier. The way this show enacts that frustration, though, often lapses into tediousness, closer to the worst goopy grandeur of “Dawson’s Creek” than the energetic cleverness of “The O.C.”

Part of that is the strenuously precocious, self-consciously pretentious dialogue — in and of itself not a vice, and certainly accurate for the kind of teens these teens are. But “Looking For Alaska” is nostalgic for itself , like it’s admiring itself in a mirror instead of making eye contact. This neutralizes the immediacy and intimacy that can make coming-of-age stories so special. We can go along for the ride, like “Freaks and Geeks,” or we can have some distance to reflect, like “The Wonder Years,” but not both.