Which Teen Wolf Character Are You?

Learn More About Teen Wolf

MTV's Teen Wolf premiered in June 2011 and ran for six seasons and one hundred episodes. It borrowed its title and basic premise from the 1985 Michael J. Fox comedy, and then almost immediately abandoned the comparison — creator Jeff Davis rebuilt the concept as a serialized supernatural drama with real horror elements, closer in tone to early Buffy than to the goofy original film. The bait-and-switch worked: the show became one of MTV's most successful scripted properties and a defining text for a generation of online fandom.

The setup is familiar. Scott McCall, an unremarkable high school sophomore with asthma and a spot on the bench, is bitten by a werewolf in the woods outside Beacon Hills. He wakes up faster, stronger, and considerably less asthmatic — and also bound to a full-moon cycle he cannot control and a supernatural ecosystem he did not know existed. His best friend Stiles Stilinski, the sheriff's son, becomes the de facto researcher and strategist, a role he holds for the entire run without ever gaining a single power.

That dynamic is the show's real engine. Scott and Stiles are one of the better-written friendships in teen television — unglamorous, mutually dependent, and never undercut by a romantic triangle. Tyler Posey and Dylan O'Brien played it with enough naturalism that the more absurd plot mechanics landed anyway. O'Brien in particular became the show's breakout, and Stiles's arc through the darker later seasons gave the series some of its best material.

The supporting cast did heavy lifting. Holland Roden's Lydia Martin began as a stock popular girl and was gradually revealed as the most intellectually gifted character on the show, eventually becoming central to its mythology. Tyler Hoechlin's Derek Hale carried the series' grief, a survivor of a family tragedy who never quite learned how to let people in. Crystal Reed's Allison Argent came from a family of hunters and spent the series interrogating the code she was raised on — an arc that ended in a way fans have still not forgiven.

Teen Wolf also arrived at exactly the right cultural moment. It premiered as Tumblr was peaking, and the show's fandom became one of the platform's largest and most visible communities. Gifsets, ship wars, and fan theories drove viewership in a way that was genuinely novel for a cable drama at the time, and the production was unusually responsive to it. The show's willingness to engage with its audience online is now standard practice; in 2011 it was not.

The series ended in 2017, and the story continued in the 2023 Paramount+ film Teen Wolf: The Movie, which brought back much of the original cast. Reception was mixed, but the turnout confirmed that the audience never really dispersed. Streaming availability has since introduced the show to viewers who were too young for the original run, and Beacon Hills has had a steady second life on TikTok ever since.

If supernatural teen drama is your genre, our Buffy the Vampire Slayer quiz is the obvious ancestor, and our Vampire Diaries quiz and Twilight character quiz cover the same era of the genre. For the monster-hunting-as-family-business angle, try our Supernatural character quiz.

So which member of the pack are you — the reluctant leader, the one with the corkboard, the genius, the loner, or the hunter rewriting her own code? Take the quiz above and find out.