Be Honest with Yourself, Forget Your Fears and Doubts
Longtime readers of my blog may recall my frustration with the Degrassi franchise, whose popularity was leading it down a road of glamourisation (and, to be frank, Americanisation) which I didn't like, since it detracts from the authenticity at the heart of the series' appeal. I was beginning to feel like this hallmark of Canadian television had jumped the shark.
With Degrassi: The Next Generation going Hollywood and then taking Manhattan, I wasn't exactly reassured about where things were going. I continued to drop in from time to time, but Season Nine only seemed to continue the trend with ripoffs of Gossip Girl and Twilight, along with weird detours into storylines about LARP campaigns and Mary Sue fanfic.
My hopes of (eventually) putting together a Degrassi Timeline for the whole decades-long saga also fell by the wayside when I realised the various acts of time compression and expansion had messed up previous continuity in favour of a "soap opera time" approach to things. This season is portrayed as occurring in the present day, but since recent seasons have only covered a semester apiece, it should really still be around 2008.
Having said all that, I thought the decision to make forty-eight episodes this season (explicitly adopting a telenovela format, with four new episodes a week for the summer) was insane...but, much to my surprise, the series is actually showing quite a turnaround in quality. The show has (perhaps wisely) dropped The Next Generation from its title, since a decade of production is getting close to The Third Generation territory, but this new "generation" of characters is drawing me into their lives in a way other successors had failed to do in recent years--even if, on a personal level, I'm trying not to think too much about the fact that some of these actors/characters were born the year I graduated high school.
The most intriguing of these newcomers for me is Adam Torres, a transgender character played by Jordan Todosey who's also an opening-credits regular castmember. Degrassi has taken (what I feel is) the right approach up to this point, where Adam has been playing a supporting role in other characters' storylines without his gender identity being mentioned at all. (One of these storylines also happened to feature the brief appearance of a fake Manitoba Driver's Licence which actually looked accurate. Good job, researchers! :)) Although there's a brief allusion to it in the music video teaser for this season, things like the cast profile linked above and Adam's in-character Twitter have yet to make any direct reference to his transgender status.
Admittedly, this storyline requires a certain suspension of disbelief--Adam has been "passing" very successfully at the school so far, which I don't think would really happen. (Judging by the comments on MuchMusic's site, at least some younger viewers just think he's a tomboy.) Regardless of that, though, I'm very interested to see where Adam's character arc is going, especially since the advertising points to his big character revelation coming this week. The only thing that sucks about that timing, for me, is that I'll be out of the country for part of the storyline (more on that later), so I'll have to catch up after the fact.
One of the panels I attended when I went to ConVergence this year was called "Sci-Fi Made Me Gay and Other Influences," which (as you might imagine) was largely about GLBT representation in genre fiction. At one point, the discussion turned to how the "T" in GLBT was still lacking today even as the "GLB" progressed, and after the panel, I (privately) lamented that this was unlikely to change anytime soon, since I wasn't sure how transgender characters could be introduced into television series without being seen as mere tokens.
However, with examples coming along like Adam Torres and Nadia Schilling, an intersex regular played by Florentine Lahme on the short-lived Defying Gravity (whose gender identity was only hinted at before the series was cancelled), perhaps there is hope for more inclusive, three-dimensional portrayals of such characters after all.
With Degrassi: The Next Generation going Hollywood and then taking Manhattan, I wasn't exactly reassured about where things were going. I continued to drop in from time to time, but Season Nine only seemed to continue the trend with ripoffs of Gossip Girl and Twilight, along with weird detours into storylines about LARP campaigns and Mary Sue fanfic.
My hopes of (eventually) putting together a Degrassi Timeline for the whole decades-long saga also fell by the wayside when I realised the various acts of time compression and expansion had messed up previous continuity in favour of a "soap opera time" approach to things. This season is portrayed as occurring in the present day, but since recent seasons have only covered a semester apiece, it should really still be around 2008.
Having said all that, I thought the decision to make forty-eight episodes this season (explicitly adopting a telenovela format, with four new episodes a week for the summer) was insane...but, much to my surprise, the series is actually showing quite a turnaround in quality. The show has (perhaps wisely) dropped The Next Generation from its title, since a decade of production is getting close to The Third Generation territory, but this new "generation" of characters is drawing me into their lives in a way other successors had failed to do in recent years--even if, on a personal level, I'm trying not to think too much about the fact that some of these actors/characters were born the year I graduated high school.
The most intriguing of these newcomers for me is Adam Torres, a transgender character played by Jordan Todosey who's also an opening-credits regular castmember. Degrassi has taken (what I feel is) the right approach up to this point, where Adam has been playing a supporting role in other characters' storylines without his gender identity being mentioned at all. (One of these storylines also happened to feature the brief appearance of a fake Manitoba Driver's Licence which actually looked accurate. Good job, researchers! :)) Although there's a brief allusion to it in the music video teaser for this season, things like the cast profile linked above and Adam's in-character Twitter have yet to make any direct reference to his transgender status.
Admittedly, this storyline requires a certain suspension of disbelief--Adam has been "passing" very successfully at the school so far, which I don't think would really happen. (Judging by the comments on MuchMusic's site, at least some younger viewers just think he's a tomboy.) Regardless of that, though, I'm very interested to see where Adam's character arc is going, especially since the advertising points to his big character revelation coming this week. The only thing that sucks about that timing, for me, is that I'll be out of the country for part of the storyline (more on that later), so I'll have to catch up after the fact.
One of the panels I attended when I went to ConVergence this year was called "Sci-Fi Made Me Gay and Other Influences," which (as you might imagine) was largely about GLBT representation in genre fiction. At one point, the discussion turned to how the "T" in GLBT was still lacking today even as the "GLB" progressed, and after the panel, I (privately) lamented that this was unlikely to change anytime soon, since I wasn't sure how transgender characters could be introduced into television series without being seen as mere tokens.
However, with examples coming along like Adam Torres and Nadia Schilling, an intersex regular played by Florentine Lahme on the short-lived Defying Gravity (whose gender identity was only hinted at before the series was cancelled), perhaps there is hope for more inclusive, three-dimensional portrayals of such characters after all.