TELEVISION; ‘Degrassi’: A Series For Children That Goes for the Gut

Just as it did with its initial run of 26 shows in the United States during the 1987–88 season, the new Degrassi Junior High series—whose 16 episodes began on some PBS stations in December and are making their debut on WNET, the New York affiliate, this morning at 10:30—deals with some of the harshest aspects of adolescent life. Sparing few sensibilities, the show is being talked about among people in the television industry as the adolescents’ version of Hill Street Blues or L.A. Law—a series that dispenses with tidy morality and goes for the gut.

Sample, for instance, the plot line of episode five of the new series, due to be broadcast on WNET in March. Snake, a 15-year-old ninth grader, is excited when his 21-year-old brother, Glenn, long his hero, returns unexpectedly from medical school. When Glenn picks up Snake at a school basketball game and tells his younger brother that he has to talk to their parents about “something important,” Snake’s curiosity is only slowly aroused.

Glenn: I’m moving in with this guy.
Snake: Yuh, so what?
Glenn: Well, he’s gay.
Snake: Why would you want to move in with one of those guys?
Glenn: Because I’m gay.

How Snake handles the news that his brother is not a conventional campus jock is only one of the provocative story lines in the new series. Other episodes follow the troubles of a 15-year-old, Wheels, after his parents die, innocently, in a drunk-driving accident; the drug-induced suicide attempt of Shane, a ninth-grade student whose girlfriend’s pregnancy was one of the dramas of last year’s series; and the sudden cooling of one student’s parents when she brings her boyfriend home and they discover that the fellow is Black.

The turns of life at Degrassi have attracted one of the strongest worldwide audiences ever for a series aimed specifically at adolescents, defined by Degrassi Junior High’s producers as those who are 10 to 15 years old. All or part of the first 26 episodes have appeared in more than 40 countries, including such unlikely candidates for tell-it-as-it-is programming as China, South Africa, and South Yemen. Audiences include the 3.5 million U.S. viewers registered on a week-by-week survey for PBS last year, about 1.6 million who watch the program regularly on Canadian television, and 5.5 million in Britain, Degrassi’s strongest market overseas.

“The response has been extraordinarily positive,” says Kate Taylor, the 40-year-old head of children’s and family programming for WGBH, whose work in raising financial support for the series played a crucial role in getting Degrassi Junior High launched.

The idea germinated in an earlier children’s series. Two Canadians, Kit Hood and Linda Schuyler—he an editor of television commercials, and she a junior high school teacher moonlighting in documentary filmmaking—formed a production company in 1977 called Playing for Time. A friend sent Schuyler a children’s book, Ida Makes a Movie, and its success as a half-hour film attracted backing from the CBC and Telefilm, Canada’s government film agency, for a series that became Kids of Degrassi Street, forerunner of the current show.

Twenty-six episodes of the Kids series were made, featuring a cast of 6-to-10-year-olds on Degrassi Street, a residential neighborhood in downtown Toronto notable for its mix of immigrants and WASPs, blue-collar and middle class. The idea was to make a program that looked at the world from a child’s viewpoint, without the moralizing, cuteness, or condescension that Degrassi’s mentors saw as characteristic of most children’s television—and without the intrusive adults.

In 1985, Hood and Schuyler sought the financial backing to have the show “grow,” along with the children, into its current format. From the start, Degrassi Junior High was a more ambitious project, with budgets that began at about $180,000 a half-hour episode (up to about $200,000 for the current series), compared to $20,000 for early episodes of Kids.

Schuyler, from her teaching days, was convinced adolescents would respond to a series that pictured their lives as they found them. She found an ally in Taylor of WGBH, who arranged for a third of the financing to come from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. With contributions later on from individual PBS stations, the total U.S. outlay for the series has passed $3 million.

“Often the kids don’t want to talk to their parents about their problems, even if their parents do,” Schuyler said during a break from filming at the old primary school in Toronto’s West End that serves as the Degrassi Junior High set. “What we’re trying to do is to fill the gap. It’s not our job to tell kids what’s right or wrong. What we’re trying to do is to present these really tough situations to them so that they’ll be better informed when they have to make their own decisions.”

The plots have pulled few punches. The show has tackled issues like lesbianism, abortion, and awakening sexual consciousness—including one episode where a mother interrupts her daughter’s romantic plans after seeing her 14-year-old suitor buying condoms.

Audiences have been broad. Though 40 percent of viewers in the U.S. are between 6 and 18, many are middle-aged and older. Yet the show never pretends to offer adults equal time. Teachers and parents appear only incidentally and never without youngsters. Camera angles are set to adolescent height. The school principal, Mr. Lawrence, is referred to but never appears.

The program depicts parents and teachers as no less flawed than the children. In the episode about lesbianism, Miss Avery, the teacher, leaves her preferences ambiguous, asking whether it would “make any difference” if she really were gay. Parents contribute to their children’s struggles through drinking, absences, and broken marriages.

“We’re trying to show that not all teenagers have fathers like Bill Cosby,” said Taylor, who reviews all the scripts.

In Britain, some material proved too strong: four of the first 26 episodes, including the one about lesbianism, were delayed and eventually aired on BBC2 instead of the wider-reaching BBC1. In the U.S., Taylor says, backlash has been minimal.

Taylor, formerly a junior high teacher in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, is especially proud that PBS has promoted the series as an instructional tool. Some funding has gone toward producing teachers’ guides and materials for classroom use.

“When I was teaching, I would just have loved to get my hands on something like Degrassi,” said Schuyler.

The series also kept its repertory company of amateur actors—teenagers from Toronto schools—who learn acting on the fly. The filmmakers value the freshness. The actors are encouraged to revise dialogue for realism.

“We’d never say, ‘He’s a square.’ We’d say, ‘He’s a narbo,’” said Stefan Brogren, 16, who plays Snake. “So, if something like that comes up, we get it changed.”

Now, Degrassi Junior High has reached a turning point. The current 16-episode season ends with many characters graduating to high school. WGBH has backed a new, still-unnamed series continuing the show into a high school setting for the 1989–90 season.

True to form, Hood and Schuyler moved ahead before financing was secured. To close out the series—and ensure a fresh start—they had writers destroy the school building in a fire during the graduation dance. The cause is left unclear.

Like so much of Degrassi Junior High, there is no neat solution at the end.