A two-hour television movie special, School’s Out! (1992), completed the original coming-of-age cycle of three dramatic series and the magazine show. Programmed into a CBS Sunday evening slot, in early fall School’s Out! was scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the school year. In the movie, various Degrassi characters are confronted with the transitions that follow high school graduation: the anticipation of attending 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 original Degrassi project was Liberty Street, which featured only one former cast member, Pat Mastroianni, who played a different character than before but with a similar cocky persona. Liberty Street continued the Degrassi coming-of-age chronology, focusing on “20-something” characters struggling for independence in a downtown Toronto warehouse-apartment building that required chronic upkeep and so afforded dramatic situations demanding personal negotiations. Launched on the CBC as a series in the 1994-95 season, the Liberty Street characters were introduced in an earlier television movie special, X-Rated, a title that recalls writer Douglas Coupland’s term for disenfranchised youth, popularized by his book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). Linda Schuyler is credited as the creator and executive producer of Liberty Street in association with the CBC.

The first three Degrassi series had been created and produced by collaborators 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 drew support from associate producing entries, such as WGBH-Boston, the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

The tree series achieved international success and sales and were programmed at various times on cable systems, including HBO, Showtime, and the Disney Channel as well as PBS. However, these international opportunities sometimes involved divergent national 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 U.S. audiences. This was not the case, however, with the CBC, which ran the complete version. PBS edited out a fetal icon from the episode’s open-ended narrative designed to engage television audiences in the moral and physical complexities facing teens who seek abortion. PBS’s editing decision raised public discussion in the arts and entertainment sections of major Canadian newspapers. In the short term, Canadian media coverage of PBS’s action shored up the CBC’s open attitude toward audiences. The corporation was willing to trust teens and their parents to make their own judgements on options 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, consultation ensured that the Degrassi series would remain youth centered and that the durable, realistic manner of the dramas would avoid 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 appeared untutored, it remains closer to the look and speech of everyday youths the performances of precocious kids and teens common to Hollywood films and television sitcoms.

From The Kids of Degrassi Street through Degrassi High, various schools served as narrative settings, although the dramatic situations mostly pivoted on action outside of the classroom: in the corridors, around lockers and yards, to and from school, at dances and other activities, and in and around latchkey homes, with parents usually absent or at the edges of the situations to be managed by the youths themselves. These unofficial spaces outside the jurisdiction of authority figured maintained the youth-culture themes.

The backdrop of Degrassi Talks was a school bearing a “Degrassi High School” sign. From that location, specific Degrassi actors introduced the week’s topic. This sense of a familiar locale hearkened back to The Kids of Degrassi Street, filmed in Toronto’s Degrassi Street in an inner-city neighborhood. In Degrassi Talks, the physical references to the school and to the actors who portrayed Degrassi characters carried forward the history of the earlier series. The actors appeared 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 these programs influenced the development of other mature-youth series for public and private Canadian television, such as CBC-West’s Northwood and CanWest-Global’s Madison. 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, unlike 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 generalization 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 benefitted 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 made the Degrassi project more than a mere projection of ethical lessons in episodic-series form was the media consciousness that invited young 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 suspended closure on dramatic topics and themes in keeping with open-ended sterilization. Over time, the maturity of the writing and the character development in the Degrassi series brought a rich dovetailing of plots and subplots, often threaded with nondramatic cultural asides (youth gags, humor, and media allusions) that drew attention to the aesthetics of television construction and the need for informed viewership.

A useful example is “Black and White” (1988), an episode of Degrassi Junior High about the topic of interracial dating Between a white female and a Black male. Subtly, the female teen’s parents reveal their primary fear of miscegenation. The two teens come to make their own choices in a climate of parental overreaction (for their daughter’s “own good”) and arrive at a solution for their prom-night date. In subsequent episodes, the couples face 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 pushed viewers to recall the series’ narrative past in order to contextualize the dilemma among the teens. the story thus becomes distinct from and more complex than the original plot about parental objections to interracial dating.

Degrassi: The Next Generation is an attempt to revive some of the social and ethical themes of the earlier Degrassi series for early 21st-century adolescent viewers shaped by new media. A series of 13 half-hour episodes was launched in October 2001 on CTV, with a one-hour special that brought original Degrassi characters (predominantly Joey, Caitlin, Snake, Lucy, and Spike) to the newly named Degrassi Community School for their 10-year high school reunion. The new generation is exemplified by the character Emma, 12-year-old daughter of a caring and conservative Spike who, in her adult reinvention, embodies middle-class values, unlike her working-class struggle as a Degrassi teen raising a baby, attending school, and working for sexist bosses.

Middle-class values shape The Next Generation’s narratives and characters. The episode “Secrets and Lies,” for example, features a “yuppified” family with “tweens” (youths between 10 and 14 years of age) named Ash, Page, and Liberty and a dad named J.T., who admits he is gay and has a partner with whom he is in love. The transparent moral lesson concerns a father’s dishonesty with his daughter and himself, but the lifestyle rhetoric and fail-safe romanticism are soap opera familiar. The camera style, which independent filmmaker Bruce McDonald established for the series’ other directors, displays a polish common to prime-time TV drama but not McDonald’s independent rebel filmmaking.

Executive producer/co-creator Schuyler and head writer Moore developed The Next Generation with Canadian private network CTV in partnership with television producer Epitome Pictures and new media producer Snap Media. This mix of production players is telling, and the CTV website emphasized the series’ uniqueness as a convergent TV/Internet project. The series’ narratives portray the Degrassi Community School as a wired environment for its computer-literate adolescent users. Emma and her friends spend time around the computer in her bedroom, with facilitates new moral lessons about parental control of computer access. A pedophile, posing on the Internet as romantic tween soul mate, lures Emma to a hotel rom, where he attempts to molest her, with a video camera set up to record the assault. it is the wiser adult (Spike and Snake) from the original Degrassi series who rescue an unharmed but shaken and chastened Emma.

Convergence through CTV’s interactive website allows young viewers to share their points of view and perhaps their experiences as they relate to the problem solving embedded in episodes. The website is also a tool for measuring a tween fan base built from wired activity. One key issue for television is whether convergence, in practice and in the case of this series, does create a virtual “community” of adolescent viewers or whether it largely appeases or “masters” this audience to sustain production.