television

Now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum.

drummondWhile I know that it didn’t get the attention of the deaths of Dear Abby, Stan Musial, or Earl Weaver last week, I have to admit that I felt a little sad when I saw the obituary for Conrad Bain in the New York Times.  A Canadian-born actor with quite the lengthy resume, Bain was a mainstay of television in my childhood ecause of his role as Mr. Drummond on Diff’rentStrokes.

A sitcom that began airing in 1978, Diff’rent Strokes lasted until 1986 and aired mostly on NBC (with the 1985-1986 season airing on ABC) and was the story of two black kids from The Bronx who were adopted by a Park Avenue millionaire.  It’s an odd concept for a show and one I swear only would have worked in the 1970s, but I didn’t think anything of that when I was six years old and allowed to stay up on Saturday nights to watch it (and sometimes Silver Spoons, which came on at 8:30).  This was a big deal for a kid whose bedtime was 8:00 on the weekdays and I remember loving the show so much that I tape recorded (like literally sat a tape recorder next to the television and hit “record”) the 1984 hour-long “Mr. Drummond gets married” episode.

I’m not sure if I watched it on Saturday nights beyond that, because my memory is hazy and I always associate Saturday night television viewing with The Facts of Life (briefly, anyway), and The Golden Girls (which dominated NBC Saturday nights for years), but that doesn’t matter because the show was a rerun mainstay all the way up until I was in my first year or so of high school.  WNYW, New York’s Fox affiliate (channel 5) ran Diff’rent Strokes at 5:00 p.m. and The Facts of Life at 5:30 p.m. through much of the latter part of my elementary school career, concluding it sometime when I was in junior high (what it was replaced with I don’t remember, although eventually Fox 5 ran The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends).  Since I didn’t have cable at the time, that meant I would come home, turn on the television, and at 5:00, after cartoons were done, I would see a familiar shot of the east side and hear Alan Thicke’s lyrics:  “Now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum …”  Then, it would be Arnold, Willis, Kimberly (unless it was one of the seasons where Dana Plato had been fired for being knocked up and using drugs), Sam (whose mushroom haircut I hated), and Mr. Drummond.

Bain played Mr. Drummond like a typical sitcom father, imparting some of the show’s lessons like Robert Reed did on The Brady Bunch (a show that I remember seeing for the first time at an incredibly early age and much like Diff’rent Strokes always seemed to be on) and making some lame attempt at a joke every once in a while.  He wasn’t the type of sitcom father whom you felt was “your father” or a ‘dad”; he was just … well, there, the mainstay of a show whose cast was full of problems (though I honestly didn’t know that until years later).  In fact, I don’t remember Mr. Drummond being much of a factor in most of the episodes, especially the two most memorable ones–the Nancy Reagan anti-drug epsiode, and the two-parter about sexual molestation where Gordon Jump plays the bike shop owner (though Mr. Drummond does call the authorities and is the “moral voice” throughout).  He did, however, have a couple of episodes that stood out.

Aside from his romancing Maggie (first played by Dixie Carter and then Mary Ann Mobley, who replaced Carter after NBC canceled the show and Carter went to Designing Women), there was the time Mr. Drummond came home with his neck all cramped from stress and the family discovered that Willis had severe stress and had to learn to balance the activities in his life.  There was the “Undercover Boss” episode where Mr. Drummond works at one of his company’s factories to see what it’s like to work there and challenges the entire family to “live blue collar,” which for Arnold means wearing a Van Halen T-shirt because that’s what poor people do or something.

And of course, there was the two-parter where Sam was kidnapped and at some point, Drummond had some fisticuffs with a possible kidnapper, a scene that I remember prompted my friend Harris and I to come up with the idea for a fake movie:  “Conrad Bain is X-CUTIONER 3000.”  Yeah, I don’t know why Mr. Drummond as Charles Bronson in Death Wish was so hilarious but when you’re 13, you find some of the most random crap funny, I guess.  Besides, when I told him about Bain’s death the other day, he replied, “Bonar Lives!” in reference to Conrad Bain’s twin brother Bonar, something we also found funny at 13 (and I’m amazed that I never wrote BONAR LIVES! across the front of my notebook as if it were “Save Ferris”).

Anyway, there’s only five cast members left alive from Diff’rent Strokes:  Todd Bridges (Willis, who had his share of substance abuse issues but has been clean for about 20 years), Danny Cooksey (Sam, who has a decent-sized voice-over resume and was in Terminator 2 as John Connor’s mulleted friend), Mary Ann Mobley (the second Maggie), Mary Jo Catlett (Pearl, the third maid, who now provides the voice of Mrs. Puff on SpongeBob SquarePants), and Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garrett, who will outlive them all).  And I’d like to say that the show taught me so much, but like Mr. Drummond, I think I watched it because it was simply always there.

Amy + Joey 4eva

The_Amy_Fisher_Story_DVDSo I’m not the only person in my generation who is starting to feel a little older because quite a number of the things that I enjoyed when I was in high school are turning 20.  We’ve already passed the 20th anniversaries of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten and are about a year or so away from the 20th anniversary of the release of Green Day’s Dookie, an album that I have always considered to be very significant in my personal music-listening history.

What we haven’t really noted is a moment that while it is really not much more than a blip in our culture’s history.  On December 28, 1992 and January 3, 1993, three movies about Amy Fisher aired on television.

Yeah, I know that sounded way more epic than it actually was, but you have to understand that I grew up on Long Island and for the last half of 1992 through at least the first half of 1993, and while there were plenty of other probably more important things going on in both the world and in the world of entertainment, this was the most important thing that was going on.  From the moment Amy did her perp walk to when she went to jail, you could not escape her story.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the story, in 1991, Amy Fisher began an affair with Joey Buttafuoco, the owner of the body shop where she had taken her car after wrecking it (and had supposedly enticed him into the affair so that her parents wouldn’t find out).  Fisher was sixteen years old at the time and would plead guilty to statutory rape in October 1992, eventually serving jail time.

But while the affair’s lurid details would capture Long Island’s (and eventually the nation’s) attention, nobody would have cared one bit about Amy Fisher if not for what had happened on May 19, 1992, when she knocked on the Buttafuocos’ door and confronted Joey’s wife, Mary Jo, about an affair her husband was having with one of Amy’s “friends.”  When Mary Jo blew her off, Fisher shot her in the head.  Fisher was arrested and charged three days later on May 22, and her perp walk was covered on the evening news:

Usually with stories like this, I don’t know much about what is going on until it makes such major headlines that it’s hard to ignore.  But believe it or not, I happened to be up late on May 22, 1992 (it was a Friday and being that I had no life I was probably home all night watching movies in my parents’ basement), and for whatever reason watched the 11:00 news and saw her being led away in handcuffs while the on-air reporter gave details about what she had been charged with. (more…)

Black and White

Final still from “Black & White” courtesy of degrassi.ca

Degrassi Junior High (and later Degrassi High) was known for a few long-running storylines, and I’d venture to say that the fact that these long-running storylines were organic in a sense was the show’s hallmark. In other words, characters whose stories we had been following for what seemed like forever would come and go and the next time we saw them, there would have been some progress in their lives.

Spike is the best example. Her pregnancy, which is quite possibly the thing that people remember the most about Degrassi Junior High, progressed throughout the second season of the show, even though not every episode was about her being pregnant. Other stories included the death of Wheels’s parents and constant fighting with his grandparents, the relationship between Joey Jeremiah and Caitlyn Ryan, and the interracial couple, Michelle and BLT.

This couple is the center of “Black and White,” a later episode in the last season of junior high. It is an episode that, quite frankly, I don’t remember really paying much attention to when I was watching Degrassi as a kid. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing it, but for the most part the reason I decided to cover it in this scattered discussion of the series is because there are episodes about Michelle and BLT from Degrassi High that I remember pretty vividly, so I figured that if you’re following along with this particular feature (ah, who am I kidding, nobody is), it’s probably best to cover their “origin story.”

So the issue here, as I mentioned, is racism, and right off the bat we see BLT confronting it when he bumps into a student who calls him the n-word, which incites a fight. Michelle happens to witness this, and we find out that she likes him–not because he’s fighting with someone, just because she likes him. The feeling is mutual, as Joey, Wheels, and Snake note when they tease him about Michelle being the reason that he joined the yearbook staff. About halfway through the episode, he asks her to the graduation dance.

Unfortunately, there is a complication–Michelle’s parents, who claim that she’s too young to date anyone, even though they have the reaction of “You didn’t tell us the boy you liked was black” when they meet him. When she finally has a heart-to-heart with her mother, her mom gives her the undeniably horseshit excuse of, “We’re not racist but other people are and we don’t want you to get hurt,” before piling on futher with “People like to be with their own kind.” Michelle sees through this and tells BLT she’ll go to the dance with him anyway, which is where the story ends.

In the subplot, Spike is having problems with daycare because her current daycare provider is moving to Vancouver. So, she decides that to pay to put Emma in a daycare center, she’s going to try and get a part-time job. Unfortunately, when she goes to interview for a job at a diner, the manager spends the entire time making fun of her hair and dismisses her as a punk kid.

And there’s some C plot with Bartholomew Bond and Scooter taking yearbook photos. Or whatever. (more…)

Food for Thought

Final still from “Food for Thought” courtesy of Degrassi.ca

My relationship with Degrassi seems to have been more complicated than I originally through.  I mean, it was a television show, it was on when I was home from school, and I watched it.  But it’s not like it was Saved By the Bell, which everyone watched (mainly because it was on.  It always seemed to me that SBTB being on television when you were home from school was like a USA Today being placed at your hotel room doorstep–there was nothing else to do, really.)  In fact, aside from one fleeting moment where I felt cool at the bus stop because the cool older kids had watched it, with the possible exception of my sister, I was the only person I knew who watched Degrassi.

To that extent, I developed sort of a complex.  When other people walked int he room during my Degrassi time, I felt as if I had been caught doing something, even though all I was doing was watching Canadian teen melodrama.  Okay, Degrassi Junior High wasn’t always that melodramatic, but this episode, “Food For Thought,” which tackles the issue of eating disorders, lays it on pretty thick.  In fact, it does that right away, as we open with  Kathleen (one of the more uptight and bitchy Degrassi girls) sitting at the dinner table while her workaholic father and alcoholic mother argue back and forth.  She excuses herself without eating, then goes to the bathroom, looks in the mirror and says, “You’re! So! Fat!”

Did I say that they’re laying it on thick?  I meant that they’re spackling it on. (more…)

16 Days of Glory

As of my writing this, we’re about knee-deep in the 2012 London Summer Olympics.  In fact, as I glance over to my television, the NBC Sports Network is showing a U.S.-North Korea women’s soccer match (it was either that or tennis).  I’ve always been a huge fan of the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, especially at how it has me watching and enjoying sports I would never watch otherwise (I went to lunch with some work friends the other day and we watched a water polo match that was on at the restaurant).

This love of the Olympics has its roots in my love of sports, of course, because if I didn’t like sports I wouldn’t care about the Olympics; however, I feel like sometimes I am the only guy who watches the games for the sheer pageantry of it all.  Which is why, by the way, I kept tweeting out snarky bon mots throughout last Friday night’s Opening Ceremonies, pissing and moaning about how badly NBC was mangling their tape-delayed coverage.  In fact, NBC’s fail on this part has been so epic this year it’s like a running joke among tweeters and bloggers, especially those who look forward to the games every four years.

But I’m not going to spend this entry complaining about NBC (that’s what Twitter is for).  No, I thought it might be cool to sit down for a few moments and think about why I am so enthralled by the Olympic Games and why I will spend so much time watching them, even staying up until ungodly hours to watch women’s gymnastics prelims in the summer or a curling match in the winter.  And thankfully it’s not a hard thing to figure out because the very first games I watched were I think the games that people my age think of the most when they think “Olympics.”

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be speaking for my entire generation but I think that the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics really did come to define “Olympics” for quite a number of Children of the 1980s.

I turned seven in 1984, which meant that this was the first Olympic Games that I actually remember.  I’m sure that people who are even slightly older than me will tell me they have memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics, especially the “Miracle on Ice,” and to that I say that they’re seriously lucky.  Being born in June 1977, I was all of 2-1/2 years old when the underdog U.S. hockey team beat the U.S.S.R. and then Finland to win the gold medal, so if I saw the game against the Russians (which I highly doubt), I don’t remember it at all.  Had there not been a boycott of the Moscow games that same year, I may have seen the 1980 Summer Games, but that wasn’t to be.

The 1984 Summer Olympics soundtrack cassette. This is not available on CD or digitally, so I kind of regret not getting it back in the 1980s when I really wanted it.

So, the summer when I was seven years old and was allowed to stay up slightly later than usual, I saw some of the competition, but most importantly I caught quite a bit of the opening ceremonies.  I don’t know if it was because my parents thought it was important for me to see it or if ABC aired it live instead of on tape delay (which may have been the case — a 3-hour time difference meant it might have aired live; then again, ABC tape delayed the U.S.-Soviet hockey game in 1980 so I wouldn’t put it past them), but I saw quite a bit, including parts of the Parade of Nations (or as my wife put it, “The Model U.N.”).

In my mind, I thought it was the most epic thing I had ever seen (which is saying a lot because I had been watching Star Wars every morning for the past two years).  The audience all had cards on their seats and after a guy came flying in on a jet pack–yes, a JET PACK, which is awesome on so many levels–the PA announcer told them to hold up the cards and the entire stadium was then decorated in the flags of the participating countries.  Plus, you had a theme composed by John Williams that to this day stands as one of my top five John Williams pieces (and next to his NBC News theme, one of his most underrated).  In fact, I loved it so much that when I saw a copy of the soundtrack on cassette at TSS a few years later, I wanted it.  In fact, I coveted that soundtrack so much that I actually took it out of the place where it had been placed and put it behind another cassette on another shelf where nobody but me would find it, not realizing that I probably wouldn’t ever get the money to buy it or that I didn’t have to hide it because it was 1988 and nobody but me was coveting the soundtrack (for the record, I never did get the tape).

(more…)

The Summer of 4 ft. 2

Lisa practices acting like a teenager in "The Summer of 4 ft. 2."

When my yearbook staff puts the finishing touches on its last deadline, we have a few traditions.  First, we take the ladder–a poster-sized “map” of the yearbook–and pass it around the room, each staff member tearing it until it’s completely shredded.  Second, we have a pizza party.  Third, we watch the Simpsons episode “The Summer of 4 ft. 2.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the episode, I don’t blame you.  It originally aired on May 19, 1996 and along with the star-studded episode “Homerpalooza,” capped off season 7 of the series, which means that it was an episode from back when the show was not only good but amazing.  Flipping through my copy of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family, I see that season 7 is incredibly strong: “Bart Sells His Soul,” “Radioactive Man,” “King-Size Homer,” “Team Homer,” and “Bart on the Road” are just five episodes in a year packed with gems, and I have to say that I have to consider myself lucky because this particular year (1995-1996) was when I first started watching The Simpsons on a regular basis.

You see, I actually wasn’t allowed to watch the show when it first premiered in 1990.  Not right off the bat, anyway.  I remember watching the first regular episode (not “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” but “Bart the Genius”), but when the show took off and the merchandise started hitting the shelves, my mother didn’t think that the image of Bart Simpson holding a slingshot and proclaiming he was an “underachiever and proud of it” was a good image for her kids.  Therefore, me–the 13-year-old–and my sister–the 10-year-old–were forbidden from watching The Simpsons.

Now, let’s think about this for a minute.  I had spent the better part of my childhood watching festivals of violence–from Tom & Jerry cartoons to Commando.  I was also a straight-A student who never got into any trouble at school.  How a cartoon character that was about as harmful as Dennis the Menace was going to make me rebel in some way was completely beyond me.  So I was stuck watching The Cosby Show instead, at least until the beginning of season two when I was able to watch “Bart Gets an F” because it was about that underachiever trying to achieve; and then wound up catching most of that and the next season.  Then my viewing fell off as I became more involved in school and found myself spending most of my nights holed up in my room doing homework or listening to Rangers games on the radio. (more…)

All You Have to Bring is Your Love of Everything

It’s been a mild winter, so skiing is the last thing on my mind (granted, I’ve only been skiing twice in my life, so it’s not on my mind very often), and based on what I have been seeing on the local news, it’s been the last thing on everyone’s mind because ski resorts are struggling.  In the same vein, I find myself wondering if any other vacation spots are struggling.  The economy isn’t exactly doing the best, and airfares are insane, so travel to anywhere for a period of time longer than a weekend seems to be costing a year’s tuition at Harvard.

Still, I keep seeing commercials for those ever-popular destinations for people who don’t find hitting the slopes and then curling up in a snowflake sweater appealing–the Caribbean.  Specifically, resorts like Sandals and Beaches.  My son loves the latest commercial for Beaches because Cookie Monster is in it (although I’m not sure that he realizes that Cookie Monster might not be at Virginia Beach when we go in July).  But the Sandals commercials always amuse me because they make a vacation to that resort seem like the most epic romantic time ever imagined.

That’s the best example of a couple frolicking outside on an apparatus that’s not in a Cialis commercial.  And actually, it’s kind of appropriate that the ad agency used “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warrens (but not the version sung by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warrens) in the commercial because the movie it comes from is Dirty Dancing, which takes place at a resort in the Catskills and mentions several times the decline of such resorts as popular family destinations.  Indeed Sandals and Beaches have sort of become the new Catskills or Poconos and the commercials are the perfect evidence of that because that Sandals commercial is very much like a commercial from my youth:

Ah, beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, which was, by the time this commercial was airing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a deteriorating shell of its former self.  What was once a popular getaway for couples in the 1960s and 1970s was by this time (at least according to Wikipedia) hemorrhaging money and wound up going into foreclosure in 1999 before being bought by Harrah’s and turned into a casino.  But this commercial aired before the great decline and if you were watching one of the syndicated channels in the New York metropolitan area (WPIX or WWOR) during the day, you wound up seeing the Mount Airy Lodge commercial at least a few times, enough that you knew the “All you have to bring is your love of everything” slogan by heart. (more…)

Taking Off

A screen shot of the end of “Taking Off,” the two-parter surrounding Wheels’ grief over his parents’ deaths. Image courtesy of Degrassi Online.

I know that I wasn’t the only person surprised by the news that Neil Hope, who played Wheels on Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High not only died, but died back in 2007 and this was just discovered now.  In fact, I probably would have never heard about it at all had I not “liked” his onetime co-star, Stacie Mistysyn, on Facebook and read a post of hers.

In light of this, I watched the Degrassi Junior High third-season two-parter, “Taking Off,” which while not the next episode I wanted to watch for the purpose of this blog (that would be “Food for Thought,” which I think I’m going to get to anyway even if it is out of order), is one of the more important points of that season because it continues two crucial stories–Wheels’ parents’ deaths, and Shane and Spike.  It also puts the spotlight clearly on Hope and his acting, as Wheels continues to struggle with his grief and does so not just by acting out but running away altogether.

We begin by finding out that Wheels has been skipping school and hanging out all day at the arcade; furthermore, he’s sold his bass guitar to get money to play video games like Konami’s Main Event, much to the chagrin of the rest of the Zit Remedy (especially Joey, who’s still in his Zack Morris “scheme to get us some airtime” phase … yunno, when he’s not flirting with Caitlin).  His grandmother is concerned and he is not just stand-offish to her, but downright hostile and wishes that he could be anywhere but home and school.  Then, the possibility presents itself when his birth father, Mike, sends him a postcard from a town called Port Hope, which is where his band has a standing gig for the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, most of the DJH crew is going to the Gourmet Scum concert that Saturday night (love the band’s name, btw), including Luke and Shane, who buy acid and then drop it before going inside.  What’ll happen is that Shane will disappear and the police will spend the better part of the two-parter looking for him, even asking Luke if the boy was under the influence (and paranoid Luke will lie his ass off).  He is eventually found underneath a bridge, having fallen off, and at the end of the second part is comatose, leaving Emma completely without a father (something that is explored in both Degrassi High and Degrassi: The Next Generation).

But that’s really a subplot and it’s Wheels who takes center stage as he hitchhikes through Ontario and at one point winds up getting picked up by a guy who seems okay at first–in fact, he kind of looks like Sam Waterson–and that guy tries to molest him.  But he makes it to Port Hope to see Mike, and his hopes for a happy reunion are dashed when Mike more or less wants very little to do with him (in fact, he’s got a pregnant fiancee) and his grandmother ultimately tracks him down. (more…)

Rock like you rocked twenty years ago!

When I was younger, I lived for year-in-review specials; heck, I still really enjoy anything with a good retrospective attached to it.  But as December 31 drew closer, I always found myself getting psyched for two things: being able to stay up past midnight, and watching whatever special was on that looked back.  Even if it was a badly produced local news special, I would look for it in TV Guide and if I wasn’t going to be home to watch it, I’d pop a tape in the VCR and set the timer.

Unfortunately, throughout those years my year-in-review options were limited by my not having access to cable, so I missed what the kids in my generation considered the definitive retrospecticus, which was MTV’s Year in Rock.  I don’t think that the channel does this anymore, but I’d say that up until maybe the late 1990s or early 2000s (when TRL had basically taken everything over), the news department was pretty steady with its programming, bringing news every hour (set to the bass of Megadeth’s “Peace Sells”), and The Week in Rock every single Friday.  So the Year in Rock made total sense.

I am sure that I saw at least one of these Year in Rock specials at one time or another, because my sister and I would often spend New Year’s Eve at my grandmother’s house and would go to bed shortly after midnight.  Some years, we stayed up listening to 106.1 WBLI play their “Top 106 Songs of the Year” coundown; others were spent watching a hockey game or reading books.  But as I went through my rather disastrous first few years as a teenager and my sister inched closer to adolescence, the two of us would sit in the back room with MTV playing, watching whatever was on it (or sometimes flipping to VH-1) because we were fully ensconced in trench warfare with my father over whether or not we would ever get cable, and at the time were taking heavier losses than at the Battle of the Somme, so we took our cable where we could get it.

Anyway, YouTube being the beautiful thing that it is, someone took the time to put the 1991 Year in Rock special up in seven parts and since it was twenty years ago–a huge year for music as well as the year I finally escaped junior high and headed to high school–I thought I’d take a look at it for my last entry of the year.  Usually, I’d spin a few paragraphs here about the various things in it and provide a link or two, but I felt like doing a bit of commentary because the entire special is available for viewing.  It may be unethical in a way and I am essentially piggybacking off of someone else’s upload … so H/T to YouTube user 1BigBucks1, whoever you are.

Okay, let’s get started. (more…)

Can’t Live With ‘Em

Wheels finds out his parents have died in “Can’t Live With ‘Em, Part 1,” the third season premier of Degrassi Junior High (pic courtesy Degrassi Online)

There were very few moments during my two years of junior high when I felt cool.  I spent most of both the seventh and eighth grade on the lower rung of the social ladder and I think that I did what I could to avoid the harassment and other crap that came with being in junior high school.  But like I said, there were times when I felt like I was kind of cool, in a way.

One of those moments was when I was standing at the bus stop one morning during the seventh grade.  I was one of five or six different kids at that bus stop, which was in the driveway of my neighbors’ house, and while I had grown up around most of them, by the time we were in junior high school together most of them were ninth graders who were bright, popular guys, the type that even though they were still the guys from across the street or next door were guys I looked up to.  I overheard one of them say, “Yeah, so Spike had the baby” and my ears went up as if I was a cat that had just heard a can opener.

Someone else watched Degrassi Junior High?  I thought I was the only person in the world who knew that the show existed (well, maybe me and Nancy), and not only that, but a couple of the cool kids liked it.  And not only that, they were talking about it in public!

What they were referring to was the two-part season 3 premier that I had just watched that week, which was called  “Can’t Live With ‘Em.”  It was the first of a few seasons worth of ground-shaking premiers, all of which involved something monumental happening to a major character.  In later seasons, these premiers would deal with abortion and AIDS, but this first one’s issue was drunk driving and would be the one with the biggest repercussions down the road, as Derek “Wheels” Wheeler’s parents were killed by a drunk driver.

Of course, the two-parter does not start off that way, and even the title itself is misleading.  When we open, the members of the Zit Remedy are practicing in Joey’s basement and when he comes home a little later than he said he’d be home, Wheels winds up being forbidden to see Joey and Snake.

After the credits roll, we get the first day of school at Degrassi Junior High, where the returning characters catch one another up as to what happened over the summer.  The two most significant changes are that Arthur’s mom won the lottery and Spike had Emma and is now a single mom.  Both of these storylines would become central to most of season three, as Arthur’s having money would cause a fair amount of tension between him and Yick, and Spike would have to deal with raising her daughter and with Shane trying to make an effort to be a father.

But the immediate concern of the episode is how Wheels is ticked off at his parents and is lobbying them to allow him to hang out with Joey … well, until he decides to simply sulk around and waits until they go to the movies one night and sneaks out of the house to go there.  The band records a “demo” (I guess it’s kind of an inside joke that this band only ever had one song … in what amounted to five years of Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, the guys played a gig, recorded a demo, and even shot a music video of ONE SONG.) and Wheels comes home to see a cop car parked in front of the house.  At first, he thinks his parents called the police on him, but then he sees his grandmother and she tells him the awful truth.

Joey and Wheels reconcile at the end of part 2. (pic courtesy Degrassi Online)

The credits roll and it’s not until the next episode that we get the aftermath, which deals with Wheels’ grief.  He seems to be in shock for a few days and won’t talk to Joey at all (meanwhile, Snake doesn’t know what to say), then loses it in the hallway and punches the crap out of him.  But after talking to his grandmother about how much he blames himself, Wheels is able to deal a little more with this tragedy and reconciles with his friend.

It’s an episode that has a few cheesy moments, even in a story that’s very honest and realistic.  I’ve never been unfortunate to lose either of my parents, but it does seem that the grief is portrayed in a pretty accurate way.  Neil Hope overdoes it a little in the fight scene (the way he punches Joey is a little silly, like he wasn’t very good at it), but you do feel like he’s a step closer to healing when he and Joey hug at the end of part two.  However, in the middle of all of this, Wheels has a dream wherein he sees his parents coming home from a movie and when he tells them he thought they were dead, they say, “We are” in a bad horror movie sort of way.

But like I said, the shock of the deaths (not even hinted at until the cop car is outside his house) and his anger as well as how his friends handle it (Snake, the awkward guy, especially) is done almost quietly and even with subtlety at some moments, which is something that many other television shows featuring teenagers often fail to accomplish.

And then there are the subplots and other storylines that are getting off the ground.  We have Spike, who was the focus of the end of season two and whose baby everyone obviously wanted to know about, but instead of showing the baby (we do see some pics of Emma in the NICU) and having a full baby-oriented episode, we have some moments where Shane tries to talk to her and seems to start making an effort as a father.  Lucy meets a guy and it becomes evident that there will be tensions between the two of them over a guy.

Speaking of friendships, Arthur and Yick are telegraphed as having a break in their friendship this season, even though they seem pretty close. They misdirect Bartholomew Bond, a seventh grader, into an eighth grade classroom in a moment that is supposed to be funny but just shows how kind of dumb they are; and Arthur reads the business pages while in the cafeteria line so he can check out his stocks, which is a little silly.  Granted, this is actually pretty true to Arthur’s character but off the bat it is pretty irritating especially since we find out that Stephanie’s mom shipped her off to boarding school and that Arthur is going to give his little cousin Dorothy the same treatment Stephanie used to give him.  Finally, Kathleen begins a run for class president, which calls back to that first season premier where Stephanie does her “All the way …” campaign and is eventually ousted by the kids in the grade below her (Kathleen among them).  You can really see that her perfectionism is going to get in the way this season.

What is great about introducing all of these storylines in the first couple of episodes of the season is that it’s done more organically than so many other television shows.  Yes, there are moments where every character gets a little screen time, but most of the conversations that start off these various tensions take place in hallways or in classrooms before the bell rings, which is where most of the important conversations in a school take place.  It’s a great way to get you interested in more of the show while keeping you focused on the plot at hand.

I, of course, am realizing this now but didn’t have this in-depth analysis of the show when I was twelve years old.  I simply knew that I didn’t have cable to TV to watch at the end of the day; I simply could turn on PBS around 5:00 or 5:30 and watch a pretty cool show about teenagers.  Oh, and as I was finding out at the bus stop that day, I wasn’t alone.  As those ninth grade guys continued talking about Degrassi, I considered jumping into the conversation, but I didn’t want to be accused of eavesdropping and the bus was about to pull up, so I never did get to say anything, so my moment was lost.

But oh well, I could still watch.

Part 1

 

Part 2