What is it about high school that makes it so achingly compelling, even decades after we can count our age by using -teen as a suffix? Hormones are raging, emotions are heightened, and those four years are naturally packed with drama and tension. Though the wounds eventually scab over and heal, the scars remain, and a phantom pain can be reawakened just by witnessing others experiencing it.

Two teenage dramas, one scripted and one a documentary, offer very different portrayals of adolescence with a common theme: high school sucks. Gossip Girl, from The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz, is yet another exploration of the ups and downs of the rich and shameless. Like his previous series and 90210 before it, the show focuses on the glamorous lives of the spoiled elite, with a middle-class control group to temper the glorious excess. Sure, rich kids in Manhattan have access to designer labels and top-shelf booze, but their problems are equally augmented: It isn’t easy havin’ green.

Conversely, American Teen follows a group of high school seniors in small-town Indiana. They may not have mo’ money, but they sure do have mo’ problems. All the classic John Hughes archetypes are accounted for: the popular girl, the jock, the nerd, the artsy type. They represent different levels of popularity, but their issues are surprisingly similar. Dealing with classes, dating and choosing colleges, their experiences are universal. While GG‘s Queen B and wanna-be Little J are jostling over control of the Heathers, these Warsaw Community High School kids are just trying to figure out how they’ll pay for college—if they can even get in.

Gossip just added a new girl to the cast, the conniving and manipulative Georgina. Played with soapy aplomb by Michelle Trachtenberg (and none of the whining she was so hated for on Buffy), the bad girl sends her reformed former BFF porn and cocaine and later roofies her drink. It’s all very arched-eyebrow evil, but it’s more ridiculous than unnerving. In American Teen, when popular queen bee Megan doesn’t get the prom theme she was pushing for, she takes revenge on the student responsible by spray-painting a penis and the word “fag” on his bedroom window. Discussing it with a friend later, she exhibits remorse over nothing other than the idea of getting caught. Now that’s genuinely chilling.

Later, we learn some of the reasons for Megan’s misplaced anger, which doesn’t excuse her behavior but does help explain it. And that’s the difference between the two: Georgina is bad because it’s fun, for the character and for the audience. But ultimately, most of us can’t relate to her shenanigans. Megan is a real person with real problems who lashes out in a very real way. And though the truth may not necessarily be stranger than fiction, strangely, it’s more engaging. You couldn’t pay me to go back to high school, but I’ll keep paying to watch other people do it.