Negotiating Canadian Culture Through Youth Television: Discourse on Degrassi

Known from its inception as a television franchise that targets young people while dealing with the complex issues facing them in a mature and realistic fashion, Degrassi is, perhaps, one of the most internationally recognized aspects of Canadian popular culture. Following the relative success of their CBC series Kids of Degrassi Street (1979-1985), Kit Hood and Linda Schuyler created what would, over the next twenty years, become an increasingly popular franchise and an unprecedented international hit for Canadian television. Degrassi Junior High (1987-1989), Degrassi High (1989-1991), and the made-for-TV movie School's Out! (1992) targeted a niche market consisting mostly of Canadian youth by charting the lives of a large group of Toronto teens and pre-teens. By having its actors go into the real world to discuss real problems facing teens, Degrassi Talks (1992)—a six-episode documentary series that provoked the publication of book tie-ins and educational reference materials—capitalized on the unusual combination of popularity and educational value espoused by the series. In 2001, CTV aired the first episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation. Still set and filmed in Toronto, the show now focuses on the lives of a new group of students, including the daughter of one of the major characters from the original. Like its predecessors, the new show is a hit in Canada and has been steadily gaining popularity in other countries such as the United States and Australia.

Amid the critical discourse pertaining to Degrassi, one encounters questions about television studies, problems facing young people, global youth culture, and nostalgia. But the topic perhaps most often broached by Degrassi scholars and fans is the series' "Canadianness." To be more precise, conversations about the series tend to reflect the idea that Canadian culture offers representations of youth and childhood that are somehow more authentic than, say, American television.¹ In this review essay, we assess the prevalence of this type of rhetoric by reviewing Degrassi: Generations, Kathryn Ellis's catalogue of the entire televised franchise, and a collection of essays edited by Michele Byers called Growing up Degrassi: Television, Identity, and Youth Cultures. These non-fictional texts clearly emphasize distinctions between American and Canadian approaches to the "realistic" representation of childhood and adolescence. We then move on to test the assumptions made in these books by looking at four re-released novelizations of episodes from what critics and fans tend to dub "Degrassi Classic," as well as two graphic novels adapted from storylines found in Degrassi: The Next Generation. None of the fictional texts make overt claims for the authenticity of Canadian representations of childhood or youth, although they do assume an audience that is willing to accept Canada as the setting for a number of events to which middle-class (and ostensibly "Westernized") children and teens can relate. Generally speaking, the "Canadianness" of the books is rather inconspicuous. What is conspicuous about these texts, though...