DEGRASSI
(The Kids of Degrassi Street; Degrassi Junior High; Degrassi High; Degrassi
Talks)
Over the decade
of the 1980s, three Degrassi drama series appeared on the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada's public television
network. The programs, all in half-hour format, began with The
Kids of Degrassi Street, which was followed by Degrassi Junior
High, then Degrassi High. Central Degrassi actors then
reappeared in the CBC's 1991-92 season as roving interviewers and
hosts of Degrassi Talks, a youth magazine program. This program
focused on pertinent topics such as sex, work, and abuse, all examined
from the perspectives of Canada's youth. This point of view was
in keeping with the pre-credit program statement, "Real kids talking
to real kids from the heart." The federal government's Health and
Welfare Canada was a core sponsor of Degrassi Talks, suggesting
official recognition and support of a distinct youth culture and
an agenda of intentional socialization, using CBC television and
the well-known Degrassi cast as teaching agents.
A two-hour television
movie special, School's Out! (1992), completed the Degrassi
coming-of-age cycle that had structured the three dramatic series
and the magazine show. Programmed into a CBC Sunday evening slot,
in early fall, School's Out! was scheduled to coincide with
the school year calendar of returning students. In the movie various
Degrassi characters are confronted with the transitions that
follow high school graduation--the anticipation of university, the
dissolution of a high school romance, a tragic highway accident,
rootlessness, work prospects and, ultimately, a fall reunion at
the wedding of a long-standing couple.
An outgrowth
of the entire Degrassi project is Liberty Street,
which features only one of the former actors, Pat Mastroianni, who
plays a different character than previously but with a similar cocky
persona. Liberty Street continues the Degrassi coming-of-age
chronology, focusing on "twenty-something" characters struggling
for independence in a downtown Toronto warehouse-apartment building
that requires chronic up-keep and so affords dramatic situations
that demand personal negotiations. Launched on the CBC as a series
in the 1994-95 season, the characters were introduced in an earlier
television movie special, X-Rated, a title that recalls writer
Douglas Coupland's coinage for disenfranchised youth, popularised
by his 1991 book Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture.
Linda Schuyler is credited as the creator and executive producer
of Liberty Street, in association with the CBC.
The first three
Degrassi series had also been created and produced by Schuyler
and Kit Hood and their Playing With Time (PWT) Repertory Company,
in association with CBC drama departments and the support of Telefilm
Canada. Eventually, the series also drew support from associate
producing entities such as WGBH-Boston, the U.S. Corporation for
Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service.
The Degrassi
series achieved international success and sales, and was programmed
at various times on cable systems such as HBO, Showtime, Disney
Channel, and the Public Broadcasting Service. But these international
opportunities also confronted broadcasting and censorship standards
which revealed cultural differences between Canada and the United
States. A two-part Degrassi High episode concerning abortion,
for example, was truncated by PBS for American audiences. This was
not the case, however, with the CBC, which ran the complete version.
PBS edited out a strong fetal icon from an open-ended narrative
designed to confront television audiences with the moral and physical
complexities facing teens who seek abortion. The editing decision
raised public discussion in the arts and entertainment sections
of major Canadian newspapers. In the short term, the Canadian media's
coverage of PBS's action shored up the cultural attitude of the
CBC. The Corporation was willing to trust youth audiences, and their
parents, to make their own judgments on alternatives, positive and
negative, presented in the complete version of the episode.
Yan Moore, head
writer of the Degrassi series, tailored the scripts with
the vital participation of the repertory cast, young people drawn
from schools in the Toronto area. The situations, topics and dialogue
were vetted in regular workshops involving the young actors. In
the interest of constructing valid actions and responses for the
characters, this type of earnest consultation ensured that the Degrassi
series would remain youth- centered, and that the dramas' durable
realist manner would avoid the plasticity common to television's
generic sitcom families. Even as the actors grew within their roles
over the first three series, and as new characters were added, a
naturalistic acting style prevailed. If the acting at times appears
untutored to some viewers, it remains closer to the look and speech
of everyday youths than those of precocious kids and teens common
to Hollywood film and television sitcoms.
From The
Kids of Degrassi Street through Degrassi High, various
schools serve as the essential narrative settings, though the dramatic
situations mostly pivot on action that occurs outside the classroom:
in the corridors, around lockers and yards, to and from school,
at dances and other activities, in and around latch-key homes with
parents usually absent or at the edges of the situations to be addressed
by the youths themselves. These unofficial spaces outside the jurisdiction
of authority figures serve as settings for the youth culture themes.
Even the backdrop
for Degrassi Talks is a school bearing a "Degrassi High School"
sign. From that location specific Degrassi actors introduce a week's
topic. This sense of a familiar locale hearkens back to The Kids
of Degrassi Street, filmed on Toronto's Degrassi Street in an
innercity neighbourhood. In Degrassi Talks the physical references
to the school and to the actors who portray Degrassi characters
carry forward the series history. The actors appear to have graduated
into role models of youth, with interspersed dramatic clips from
past series serving as proof of their apprenticeship.
The evolutionary
Degrassi series established high standards for representing
youth on television, and influenced the development of other mature-youth
series for public and private Canadian television--CBC-West's Northwood
and CanWest--Global's Madison, for example. By integrating
sensitive issues into the characters' narrative worlds, and by foregrounding
and backgrounding various continuing characters as opposed to the
convention of "principle" and "secondary" figures, the Degrassi
series developed depth and avoided topic-of-the week formulas. Abortion,
single parenthood, sex, death, racism, AIDS, feminism, gay issues:
these became conditions the characters had to work through, largely
on their own individual or shared terms, within the serialized narrative
structures.
A generation
of Canadian kids could be said to have grown up with the Degrassi
series. The narrative themes held out implicit lessons for the targeted
youth audiences--and for parental viewers. This teaching-learning
ideology befitted the educational basis of the entire project as
well as the cultural mandate of the CBC. With ethical lessons coded
into the narratives, the characters were motivated to make mistakes,
not merely choices, appropriate to them.
What makes the
Degrassi project more than a mere projection of ethical lessons
in episodic-series form, however, is the media-consciousness that
invites viewers to ponder the dramatic futures of characters even
when presented in genre-based television. The frequent use of freeze-frames
at the ends of episodes suspends closure on dramatic topics and
themes, in keeping with open-ended serialization. Over time, the
maturity of the writing and the character development in the Degrassi
series brought a rich dove-tailing of plots and sub-plots, often
threaded with non-dramatic cultural asides--youth gags, humour and
media allusions--that draw attention to the aesthetics of television
construction and the need for informed viewership.
A useful example
is "Black and White" (1988), a Degrassi Junior High episode
focusing on the topic of inter-racial dating between a white female
and a black male. Subtlely, the female teen's parents reveal their
main fear, miscegenation. The two teens come to make their own choices
in a climate of parental over-reaction (for their daughter's "own
good") and arrive at a solution for their prom-night date. In subsequent
episodes, the couple faces an ethical dilemma of their own making.
The young man avoids revealing to his white girlfriend that he is
attracted to another young woman, and has in fact been dating this
black teen during the summer holiday. Jealousy follows deceit. The
emotive complexity pushes viewers to recall the series' narrative
past in order to contextualize the dilemma among the teens. And
the story has thus become quite distinct from and far more complex
than the original parental objections to interracial dating suggested.
The "Black and
White" episode is structurally connected by a recurring photographic
session conducted by two of the youngest boys in the school. One
boy is blond and white, the other curly-haired and black. Both are
"brains," who cajole older students into posing before their camera
for the yearbook in postures reminiscent of "school daze" activities
(holding a basket ball, and the like). As photographers, the two
boys constantly draw attention to looking, performing and image-making,
and bind us as television viewers to their collaborative function
and humour. Following one commercial cluster, the narrative returns
with an extreme close-up of the blonde boy as he dusts his camera's
lens with a brush. His face, distorted in close up, indicates that
he is cleaning the lens of the television camera, yet the effect
of his direct gaze, as if penetrating the screen, engages us in
the visual processes of his activity. His knowing grin adds a pleasurable
dimension to his knowledge of creating a media-conscious effect.
This very act of a youth constructing television imagery is at the
heart of the Degrassi mandate to create television of narrative
and cultural purpose--always from the perspectives of youth.
-Joan
Nicks
Devins,
Susan. "New Kids on the Block." Cinema Canada (Montreal,
Quebec, Canada), April 1986.
Magder,
Ted. "Making Canada in the 1990s: Film, Culture, and Industry."
In, McRoberts, Kenneth, editor. Beyond Quebec: Taking Stock of
Canada. Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, 1995.
Miller,
Mary Jane. "Will English Language Television Remain Distinctive?
Probably." In, McRoberts, Kenneth, editor. Beyond Quebec: Taking
Stock of Canada. Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press,
1995.
