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.”

Aisha, an 18-year-old student in London, was introduced to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Full House by her older siblings, who were born in the 90s and wanted to “culture” her. She’s tried to get her friends into those shows, as well as Friends and Desperate Housewives, but it’s mainly a bond she shares with her family.

Meanwhile, Bríg, a 20-year-old student who lives in Pennsylvania and uses they/them pronouns, is obsessed with ER — and wants it known that they loved it even before its successor The Pitt, currently airing on HBO, captured the zeitgeist. Their mom introduced them to the show after watching ER’s original 15-season run that began in 1994.

“I also like a lot of other medical procedurals, but ER is ER. It defined the genre,” Bríg tells Yahoo, sounding like a lovably precocious television nerd. “Watching almost anything that came out after it, I can always tell that they’re inspired by ER — and a lot of the time they’re just not doing it the way ER did!”

For some young people, returning to the same characters and storylines from their favorite rewatchable shows over and over again reveals new layers each time. Stella, 20, has been obsessed with The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about a gaggle of socially awkward geniuses that ran from 2007 to 2019, since her sister got the DVD box set for Christmas when she was six. The Kentucky-based student says that 90% of the jokes went over her head at the time. “Watching it as I grew up … I got more and more of the jokes,” she says. “It was almost like the episodes were new in a way, even though I’ve seen them a thousand times.”

Nostalgia for times they never knew

The comfort of sinking into a show from a different time — and in many cases, what seems like a happier time — appeals to a lot of young people. Anna, a 22-year-old student in Rhode Island, started watching the idealistic political drama The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006, when she was 12. Her parents thought that it might help her understand more about American government. Anna says she finds comfort in looking back on a time when “America was more stable.”

Some young people aren’t just nostalgic for the eras that their parents lived through — they’re going even further back than that. When Sophie wants a little lift, she puts on vintage sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66) or The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). The 22-year-old graduate student, who lives in Texas, says they remind her of a “simpler time” before television’s turn toward the dark and intense. No one seems to be hanging out on TV anymore, leading fans of chill, familiar comedies to reach back into the vintage TV archives in search of comfort. Mary Tyler Moore is certainly no Euphoria, after all.

“I feel like a lot of good TV shows today tend to be dramas,” Sophie tells Yahoo. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show makes me feel empowered. … if she can thrive as a single woman in her 30s, there’s no reason I can’t at 22!”

Meanwhile, Kirsten, a 26-year-old from Indiana who works at a nonprofit, estimates that she’s seen every episode of Little House on the Prairie at least 10 times. “It’s such a comfort show to me, one of those things I can just watch over and over again,” she tells Yahoo of the historical drama series, which ran from 1974 to 1983. “I cry, I laugh and I now think Pa Ingalls is the hottest man to ever exist. … I realize not all of it holds up by today’s standards, but it’s still just such good TV.”

Part of why young people are gravitating toward vintage TV shows has to do with the way the entertainment industry has been upended in the last two decades. New shows pop up all the time but they’re also easily cancelled, as streamers look to extract maximum profits from their slate. That doesn’t give viewers much time to build relationships with new characters. Abandoning 20-episode seasons and the “appointment TV” model of keeping audiences coming back every week has led to shorter seasons.

“Back in the day, you had almost 4 months of getting a new episode every week,” says Grace, a 25-year-old from Utah who’s obsessed with the West Wing and Gilmore Girls. “When it was done, they reran old seasons, and we just got to enjoy the show. … Now we really have no time to connect and truly care, [so then fewer] people tune in for the second season.”

Lauren, a 19-year-old student in Missouri and a Star Trek fanatic, was one of several young people to mourn the death of the “filler” episode — a diversion from the main narrative that explores character dynamics or unique scenarios but doesn’t push an overarching plot forward.

“We can’t care for the characters if we don’t know the characters,” she says. One of her favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series is a filler episode in which a character accidentally transports himself to a mysterious planet, travels through time, accidentally changes history and has to undo it. It helps develop said character and keeps the audience on its toes, but what happens doesn’t affect the overall series plot.

Many Gen Z-ers also said that after the unprecedented events of the past few years, they’re looking to escape the gritty realities of our own time. Kate, a 19-year-old student in New Jersey, started watching 2000s-era reality TV shows like The Real World and The Real World: Road Rules during the pandemic because they were tired of COVID plotlines and got nostalgic for a time before shows were full of out-of-touch wannabe influencers and rich people.

“I feel like newer shows have a really polished and wealthy look to them that makes the premise unrelatable,” she tells Yahoo. “I'm sure that the characters in older shows were also blindly rich and out of touch, [like] Carrie [Bradshaw from Sex and the City], but I wasn't alive then to know the difference!”

Old shows find new life online

These shows might be older, but many young people still have a very modern way of interacting with them. There’s a strong community of M*A*S*H fans who dissect their favorite scenes and thirst for star Alan Alda on Tumblr, and Little House on the Prairie has an active subreddit that debates and parodies the plot. Don’t get fans of Supernatural started on how much fanfiction they’ve written or read on Archive of Our Own.

“I’m 24 and my favorite TV show is M*A*S*H,” Rosie, a New Yorker who works in museum education, tells Yahoo. She knows it’s a little funny that she’s hooked on a show that ended nearly 20 years before she was born, but she’s not alone. There’s a lot to talk about.

“It’s a brilliantly written TV show with a perfect mix of comedy and drama,” Rosie says. “While our lives are not necessarily like the characters’, we are living in a similar time period … with regard to societal unrest and change, so a lot of the messages and themes feel very relevant.”

If a series is available as a DVD box set at someone’s grandmother’s house, there’s probably an online community for it too. Even Gilligan’s Island, which aired in the '60s.

“I used to be a part of a multifandom Tumblr blog back in middle school and I was the resident Gilligan’s Island fan,” Elizabeth, an 18-year-old student in California who estimates that she’s seen the show hundreds of times, tells Yahoo. “Sometimes I still see posts about it that I enjoy, mainly behind the scenes and bloopers.”

For Gen Z fans, vintage TV shows aren’t just about escaping to the past — they’re also about the community they’re finding with other fans and a way to stay connected to their families. The stories they’ve latched onto have already outlasted their eras, and for now, they still feel worth holding onto.