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Perhaps there was something magical about those few days that I have reduced to a subconscious impetus for the inner glow I get when I think about Canada. Perhaps there’s something poetico-mythical I find in its geography and terrain, a Pacific Northwest that flies far above the one where I have spent the greatest percentage of my life. What I can say for certain is that a fair number of Sunday afternoons of the early 1990s of my childhood were spent watching Degrassi Junior High and its successor Degrassi High. This was as much by force as design, as with only three other channels to choose from at the time, and Sunday programming consisting of either sporting events or infomercials (both of which could occasionally have some sway over me, but never consistently), it was what I had to settle for.

(This may be as good a time as any to briefly address the issue of how exactly Degrassi Junior High is the Chapter Two. Unbeknownst to me until several years ago, there was a series entitled The Kids of Degrassi Street that began as one-off specials in the late 1970s and early 1980s before becoming a weekly event around the mid-‘80s. Several of the future cast members of DJH/DH were among the ranks here, but playing different characters, although the series did end with graduation from elementary school, setting the stage for what would follow.)

The show generally aired from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays on Oregon Public Broadcasting, and if, I remembered to set the VCR to tape it, I would watch after I was done working for my parents. I am having a hard time placing whether OPB ran back-to-back eps of one series or did one from each. I believe that the first episodes I may have seen were the series openers from Degrassi High which, uncommon for a teen series then or now (or really most television series), crafted a serious storyline in which one of the lead characters, pregnant from a summer fling, decides to have an abortion. But this isn’t just a hastily thought–out action that the series milks for an episode or two and then drops. And in this example rests the unique (in my eyes) appeal of the show.

Almost every 30-minute installment was what could be derisively called a “Very Special Episode” and yet, there was an unironic earnestness at the heart of the series (and Kids of Degrassi Street/Degrassi High as well) that helped gloss over the stiltedness and the breathless attempt to cover almost every hot-button and potentially controversial issue imaginable in a fair and even-handed manner. It wasn’t just the fact that Degrassi Junior High made its dramatic livelihood with scores of things “you can’t do on television” - to reference another Canadian television series that targeted adolescents - but that sincerity oozed out of its pores like angry eruptions on a teen’s hormone-ravaged face (apologies for the icky simile).

It was this sincerity - a trait one might also associate with public broadcasting in general - that set off the tripwires in my brain and made me regard it with not a little wonder and some puzzlement, viewing something that should be entirely familiar, even rote, as somehow just... slightly... askew. I would ascribe this sincerity as part of its uniquely Canadian DNA, even if, as one Degrassi fan site I came across noted, apart from the accents and inflections, the vibe of the show is “more 1980s Toronto Rust Belt than anything else.” I am not entirely sure if I agree.

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