Degrassi Junior High – Season 1

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: B-     Episodes: B

 

 

When Degrassi Junior High debuted in 1987, some of the critics went after it unfairly.  They expected something very groundbreaking since it was on public TV, and though the acting is sometimes flat, the shows have held up better than you would think.  Tackling all kinds of teen concerns like few shows before and hardly any since like drugs and self-esteem, its failure to catch on led to the further decline of such important children’s television.  After all, Saved By The Bell was an atrocity and it actually had a spin-off that was even more deranged, degrading and unnecessary.

 

Degrassi may have been trying a bit hard to be hip with its 80s quasi-New Wave look here and there, while the show might be the last portrayal of children in innocent times growing up, but the more relaxed atmosphere created for the show allows for actual stories to be told.  TV in general has forgotten that big time.  The thirteen half-hour episodes are as follows:

 

1)     Kiss Me, Steph

2)     The Big Dance

3)     The Experiment

4)     The Cover-Up

5)     The Great Race

6)     Rumor Has It

7)     The Best Laid Plans

8)     Nothing To Fear

9)     What A Night

10)  Smokescreen

11)  It’s Late!

12)  Parent’s Night

13)  Revolution

 

 

The pilot begins with brother and sister, who live in opposite divorced parent’s homes, arguing.  The younger brother is rejected by the older sister, who has changed her last name, wanting to be rid of him so she can be popular.  Besides the ethnic cleansing of her new last name, she is worried about what everyone else thinks and also wants to be school president.  That is the smart situation that launches the show and it never deviates from that path.

 

The show has a good moral center, the kind that has been thrown away for political reasons in recent years that began around the time the series debuted.  The show was co-produced between WGBH and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.  That is the place the episodes take place and also the place the Degrassi Talks segments were taped.

 

Extras include the 23-minutes-long interview piece Degrassi Talks: On Drugs, a quiz, wallpaper and PDF teaching material on DVD 1.  The same on DVD 2, though the topic of Degrassi Talks is an excellent installment on sexuality, then is about sex itself on DVD 3 that is the kind of show being aggressively censored for all the wrong reasons by prudes, the Religious Right and select idiots on the Left.  I guess critics wanted Zoom meets Room 222, with a touch of The Paper Chase, but what could live up to that?  Degrassi Junior High brings something different to the table, at a time before children became overly commodified consumers and target for gaudy advertising.  The show is about the characters, something you are not going to find much on The Disney Channel.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo