“Red Band Society” mines an adolescent fantasy: that sickness is a form of glamour. Illustration by Andy Friedman

“Red Band Society,” a jaunty teen-mortality series from Fox, begins with a bang: a cheerleader collapses, mid-cheer, onto the gym floor. Fellow-students form a circle, snapping pictures with their cell phones. Only one uses her phone to call for medical attention—a crushed-out girl who, when instructed to perform CPR on her idol, says, “Really? Yes!,” then dives in for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

As this sequence suggests, “Red Band Society”—which is set in a hospital, among a group of sick teen-agers who party, bond over impending surgeries, and engage in a variety of doomed, freighted romances—isn’t especially interested in the downside of terminal illness. Everyone is Abercrombie hot; cancer, in this world, seems suspiciously correlated with high cheekbones. It’s basically “Glee” plus “Grey’s Anatomy,” with a streak of “Scrubs” and a touch of “The Lovely Bones.” (The story, which is adapted from a Catalan show, is narrated by a wise little boy in a coma, who silently absorbs the melodramas around him.) The show mines a primal adolescent fantasy: that sickness might be a form of glamour, making a person special and deeper than other humans. “Everyone thinks that when you go to the hospital life stops,” Coma Boy intones. “But it’s just the opposite: life starts.”

Whether you find this conceit offensive or escapist will depend on your mood. For me, the crassness outweighed any charm. Zoe Levin plays the sick cheerleader, Kara, a mean girl with an enlarged heart—the kind of irony that the show plays for every possible beat. The amazing Octavia Spencer is a tough but caring nurse, who shows up with a coffee mug reading “Scary Bitch.” There are hunky doctors, as well, and a set of teen-age boys who spar and bond: the bad boy Leo (Charlie Rowe), who has bone cancer; the sensitive Jordi (Nolan Sotillo), who also has bone cancer; and Dash (Astro), who has cystic fibrosis (and who—in the pilot, at least—is stuck in the slang-slinging black-best-friend/player role). There’s also Emma (Ciara Bravo), who wears a quirky-girl hat straight out of the Amy Grant “Baby, Baby” video, and who suffers from anorexia, although her illness is treated more as a romantic obstacle than as a potentially fatal disease. On occasion, the dialogue delivers a rude punch, as in the banter about what Jordi will do with his amputated leg after surgery: “Yeah, I’m planning to freeze it.” “Like wedding cake,” Emma responds. But, mostly, the show is a bid for a ready-made audience: the ones who ate up John Green’s young-adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” which has sold ten million copies and inspired a hit movie starring Shailene Woodley.

That commercial gambit may pay off, but not because the texts are all that similar: “The Fault in Our Stars” is a far more thoughtful work. A romance between a very sick girl, Hazel Grace Lancaster, and a dreamy boy, Augustus Waters, who has bone cancer, the book is aimed at teen-agers without being tailored to their needs alone. Unlike “Red Band Society,” “The Fault in Our Stars” treats its heroine’s parents like real people, not like cartoons—which is often the watermark of ambitious teen stories in any medium. Among the many appealing qualities of Green’s novel is how much it’s about storytelling itself, and the way in which books function as a badge of identity, a marker of taste and values. Hazel is obsessed with an experimental, adult literary novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” which was created by a David Foster Wallace-like genius. Her private love for this novel—she reads it again and again, like a bible—is an expression of her identity as an outsider, an intellectual girl, forced to reckon with questions that her friends can’t understand, such as the effect that her inevitable death will have on her parents. But Hazel has no problem with the fact that her boyfriend, Augustus, prefers a different kind of book: a series of video-game novelizations, whose simple, blunt formulas satisfy his own needs—for a fantasy in which he saves lives, over and over. For all its romantic contours, “The Fault in Our Stars” is centrally a dialectic about why people seek out stories, one that never quite takes a stand on the question of whether we’re right to wish for greater clarity in our art, characters we can “relate” to, or, for that matter, a happy ending.

“The Fault in Our Stars” has inspired a roiling debate about the popularity of Y.A. fiction, particularly among adult readers. Several critics have called it flat-out shameful for a thirty-five-year-old to scarf down modern Y.A., arguing that the popularity of these books indicates that literary culture has been “dumbed down,” with readers seeking what’s easy and fun rather than struggling for deeper, more lasting rewards. The messy part about this discussion is, of course, that plenty of the most potent and enduring “literary” works focus on adolescent identity, from “Romeo and Juliet” to “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Often, it’s hard to distinguish the debate about art from the one about marketing, and from the thrumming anxiety about the economic survival of literary fiction—which is, after all, a genre itself. As with crime novels or science fiction, labelling entire genres “popular junk” or “ambitious art” is too simplistic: the teen book you like is Y.A.; the teen book I like “transcends the genre.”

This debate has focussed on books. The funny thing is that, in television, the situation is nearly reversed: seeming “teen shows” were the ones that, in the nineties, smartened up the medium, becoming a bellwether of psychological complexity. The one-season series “My So-Called Life” and “Freaks and Geeks” were more groundbreaking and radical than practically any show on network television at the time—certainly more so than splashy adult dramas like “Ally McBeal,” and, arguably, more than a much praised crime series like “N.Y.P.D. Blue.” During the era of “The Sopranos,” other shows emerged that blended teen drama with such “degraded” categories as horror and noir, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Veronica Mars” among them. Like any work that emphasizes the emotional life of teen-age girls, these series faced condescension, and were often conflated with greasier fare, like “Beverly Hills, 90210.” And yet they were the shows that began to erase the distinction between comedy and drama, to muddy established genres, and to forge a way to be warm and humane without falling into sentimentality. Contemporary shows on ABC Family, including “The Fosters,” fall into this same double bind: it’s hard to convince an audience seeking ambitious television that a show that’s designed to reach teens as well as adults might challenge them, particularly when it lacks the formal signifier of TV for grownups—looking like a movie. But how is it a guilty pleasure to watch a thoughtful show about family life? Is it the pleasure that’s the problem?

“Outlander” is a new show on Starz that is smartly made, but it, too, falls into a tricky genre category: the female-skewing action adventure. The series is based on a hit literary fantasy series by Diana* Gabaldon, which is to say, a romance novel—but that shouldn’t block snobs like me and you from watching such a lively, rich, and emotionally satisfying story. We all have our demographic kinks, but if you take a brazen brunette from the nineteen-forties, send her back in time to eighteenth-century Scotland, dress her in corsets and furs, and leave her torn between her twentieth-century husband (a witty, ardent scholar) and her eighteenth-century crush, Jamie (a well-built redhead who is capable of “gentling” horses), well, welcome to my TiVo’s Season Passes.