By “new kid” stories, I mean shows that begin with a new character, who is usually the protagonist or one of the protagonists, physically moving to a new location (town, workplace, school, etcetera). This obviously does not always apply to literal children, but like when a kid moves schools (or when anyone adjusts to a new sort of lifestyle) the character is either disoriented or disorienting. I was going to do a post about the “logical outsider” narrative but then I was thinking about a very straightforward “new kid” story that I won’t be discussing here because it’s a movie, and that’s Mean Girls. Yes, Cady represents the logical outsider in the story (observing what seems to her like a foreign culture through a very analytical framework) but she also turns into the catalyst, her presence setting off a chain of events that change everyone around her.
That’s what new kid narratives often do. Either they help give the audience perspective (or provide the audience a self-insert character) or they spark a revolution that comprises the plot of the show or season.
For this list, I’m only dealing with new kid narratives that begin in season one (sometimes they start much later; Eric [Alexander Skarsgard] in season five of True Blood is a perfect example of the logical outsider, weirdly enough) but I’m covering both types.
11. American Horror Story
Actually, this has been true of every of the three seasons of this show, and since they’re all separate stories I will discuss them each separately. Season one has the Harmon family moving into the murder house and Violet (Taissa Farmiga) has to move schools. Her parents (Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton) both make adjustments, but it’s Violet who at least in my read shoulders most of the new kid narrative. She meets a mysterious new boy (Evan Peters) and deals with a whole new set of rules, and then toward the end of the season the new kid narrative takes on another dimension as we find she’s also been thrown into a new (after)life. Season two, Asylum, had Lana (Sarah Paulson) serving as the logical outsider in the world of the hospital, the logical outsider on a very basic level — she wasn’t crazy, and the others might not have been but she was very much not. Season three, Coven, had Zoe (again, Taissa Farmiga) thrown into the world of the academy and also the world of being a witch and dealing with magic in the first place, and acting as the logical outsider by sometimes being confused by the traditions.
10. Elementary
I haven’t actually seen past season one of this yet, but any Holmes adaptation is a perfect example of the logical outsider narrative. Whoever the Watson is (in this case, Lucy Liu) makes a physical and emotional transition and is thrown into the crazy world of mysteries and deduction that doesn’t really make that much sense by normal standards that Holmes (in this case, Jonny Lee Miller) inhabits and is left to translate what happens for us, the audience. In this case, at least, Joan is also the catalyst, prompting Sherlock to work on himself and also prompting herself to make life changes.
9. Mad Men
Logical outsider situation in the extreme. Through Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) we’re introduced to the office and the way it’s run, its context and its place in history; we’re introduced to the way that most of the characters behave. Her role as logical outsider gradually lessens as we the audience become accustomed to the situation and as she becomes accustomed to the workplace she’s in, but given that the show’s first episode includes scenes of her being given a proper tour of the office by Joan (Christina Hendricks), it very much fits.
8. Dollhouse
This is only vaguely this, but it’s still an interesting point to make on this list: the literal new kid in the Dollhouse is Sierra (Dichen Lachman), who can’t herself be the logical outsider but whose presence asks the audience to be that for themselves, and the more direct logical outsider and fairly new kid, Boyd (Harry Lennix), is later revealed to be the Big Bad and have been faking his moral ambiguity and logic all along. That’s a fairly rare twist. And Echo (Eliza Dushku) often serves as the logical outsider, though she’s only a new kid in the sense of her slowly-developing independent consciousness.
7. True Blood
Another less direct new kid narrative; Sookie (Anna Paquin) does not make any life changes at the start of the series, but life changes sort of find her. She’s always known that she’s different and she’s been aware that the world is different for a while before the series begins, but the difference (vampires to begin with) crosses her path at the beginning and from them on, she’s being thrown into the world of the supernatural, learning about vampires (another purpose that the new kid narrative serves is that of providing the audience with a convenient excuse for a lot of exposition, which is especially useful when the story takes place in a world that’s different from our own, i.e. in a different time period or in a world that contains supernatural elements) and serving as the logical outsider in regards to vampire customs and vampire-human dealings as well. By season’s end, we have the first creation of a baby vamp, that of Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), and eh, it’s still season one and for a lot of the rest of the series Jessica serves as a semi-logical outsider in the show as well.
6. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is pure catalyst (as rather deconstructed in the season three episode “The Wish,” with a comment by Cordelia [Charisma Carpenter] highlighting the fact that if Buffy had never arrived in Sunnydale everything and everyone would be different). It’s one of those cases where the fact that she ushers in all sorts of weirdness when she arrives actually causes the people around her to be thrust into new situations, despite being surrounded by familiar people and places, and causes them to play the logical outsider at times. The closest the show probably gets to the specific logical outsider is Oz (Seth Green), with his dry remarks that highlight how strange things are, but everyone serves that purpose at times.
5. Deadwood
But Seth (Timothy Olyphant) and Sol (John Hawkes) are pure logical outsiders. Seth doesn’t intend to bring order to the camp, but we arrive in the camp when he does and so we can see how unruly it must look through his eyes. Deadwood is a show where new kids arrive all the time, all of them bringing some new perspective, but Seth and Sol serve as the clearest logical outsiders, eventually but not immediately enacting change of various sorts based on what they observe.
4. Firefly
Simon (Sean Maher) is a fairly straightforward logical outsider especially as regards space travel and a life of crime, and River (Summer Glau) sometimes serves as one too, but by bringing River into the crew’s lives he/they serve as catalysts as well. The life of crime continues but is simultaneously upended, leaving everyone to have to learn to make adjustments. We also get glimpses of logical outsider from Book (Ron Glass) and Inara (Morena Baccarin), the other new (or newer) kids on the ship.
3. Justified
Closer to a catalyst than a logical outsider situation, certainly; the impression I’ve gotten from the way that Art (Nick Searcy) addresses Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) is that the marshals’ office used to be a straightforward workplace. They handled cases, nothing horribly dramatic ever happened. Then Raylan gets transferred back home and accidentally keeps dragging his coworkers into all sorts of criminal drama that’s loosely connected to his old acquaintances.
2. Agents of SHIELD
Another fun subversion, sort of. All of the characters are new kids in a way: Coulson (Clark Gregg) is just forming the team. He recruits May (Ming-Na Wen), we see Ward (Brett Dalton) being recruited as well (the fact that we see his recruitment and the sort of wry, flip comments he makes sort of make it seem like he’s going to be our logical outsider, or at least like he could be, which couldn’t be farther from the truth). We don’t see it, but Fitz (Iain de Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) have been recently recruited as well; they even talk in the second episode about how they’re new to missions, but while they learn many things over the course of missions and grow quite a lot (Jemma has a more distinct arc, but) they are neither the logical outsiders (logical certainly, but that’s just their scientific personalities) nor particular catalysts. It’s really Skye (Chloe Bennet) who serves both purposes, though: at first she’s analyzing SHIELD, spying on it and from within it, and she’s questioning the way things are done. Then she’s working within it and she’s still questioning the way things are done. She’s saying the things that the audience might be thinking and asking the questions that the audience might have themselves. Furthermore, she serves as the show’s catalyst, first by getting SHIELD wrapped up with Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) and then by involving the team in subsequent situations that would not have existed were it not for either her outside perspective or her mysterious self. The outside perspective, her ability to approach things in a way that’s not the rest of the team’s, is actually highlighted in “The Magical Place,” when Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) banishes her from the Bus out of seeing that as unhelpful and May allows it because she knows it will be beneficial. And she arguably has emotional effects on the greatest number of other characters.
1. Game of Thrones
Let’s see. Well, there’s Ned (Sean Bean) playing the new kid in the courts of King’s Landing and it going horribly, horribly wrong; there’s Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maisie Williams) both playing new kid, usually logical outsider in one way or another, in their own circles and it going horribly, horribly wrong (Sansa is made to stay in the increasingly horrible situation she tries to adapt to, while after season one Arya has been on a continual roadtrip and playing the new kid constantly); there’s Jon (Kit Harington) and his Hundred Acre buddies all serving as new kids at the Wall and varyingly serving both roles, which doesn’t go well but isn’t horrible necessarily; there’s Dany (Emilia Clarke) starting with being the new kid in a horribly, horribly wrong situation (i.e. being sold into marriage) and then spending the rest of the series so far on a continual roadtrip and playing both the logical outsider and the catalyst constantly; etcetera, etcetera. (It occurred to me the other night that most if not all of the POV characters in this series have roadtripped at least a little bit, while some of them, like Arya and Dany, have been on perpetual roadtrips the majority of the time.)
bonus: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Yes, laugh, here I am including my silly pony cartoon on a list of actual real grown-up television shows. But it’s a perfect example of the new kid narrative, because here’s Twilight Sparkle coming to Ponyville and acting not only as a logical outsider (though more to the behavior of her new friends and the concept of friendship in general than to the local goings-on) but serving as a catalyst. Without Twilight Sparkle, the show would not happen. Period. This is a narrative structure that crosses genres. Clearly.
–your fangirl heroine.

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