TIFF ’25: Degrassi: Whatever It Takes

**/****
directed by Lisa Rideout

by Bill Chambers For my brother’s birthday a couple of years ago, I bought him an officially licensed novelty T-shirt for The Zit Remedy‘s “Everybody Wants Something Tour” that he continues to wear proudly for the, well, novelty factor. Talk about kitsch heaven, if you’re a Canadian of a certain age. But as I watched Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, Lisa Rideout’s new and decidedly uneven documentary about the television institution that spawned The Zit Remedy (among other fictional acts, including Drake), I began to worry I’d erred in giving money to the Degrassi Industrial Complex, whose genesis dates back to 1979, when Linda Schuyler adapted the children’s book Ida Makes a Movie into a short subject that was shot on, dun dun dunnn, De Grassi Street in Toronto. Ida Makes a Movie later became the retroactive pilot for “The Kids of Degrassi Street”–itself a dry run for “Degrassi Junior High”, which is when Schuyler’s dogged vision of a TV show that’s all Afterschool Specials finally hooked the zeitgeist. Everybody wants something they’ll never give up, indeed.

“Degrassi Junior High” was unquestionably innovative. “No experience necessary” appended casting notices, and that “necessary” meant “preferred.” They wanted kids who weren’t trained monkeys and who matched the ages of the characters they were playing, contrary to the then-popular convention of skewing older in anything aimed at young adults. Additionally, the show itself was such a ramshackle production, staffed with friends and family working out of Schuyler’s house, that they needed to avoid the actors’ union. You see where this is going. Amanda Stepto, who played punk-haired teen mom Spike, conspiratorially whispers that she and the rest of the cast were paid a paltry $50 a day and excluded from the windfall once the “Degrassi” project became solvent, presumably from syndication. Astonishingly, the talent was expected to crew as well, to help cook lunch and haul equipment twice their size. In exchange, their personal lives were raided for storylines, they burnt out, and the abrupt end to “Degrassi High” left them ill-equipped to navigate the entertainment industry, since they weren’t technically a part of it.

Bravo to Rideout and co-writer Celine Wong for acknowledging that scabbing and an alarming lack of oversight made the original series possible. But I think there’s a noticeable gulf between the Ken Loach for Kids drama Schuyler takes credit for and the teensploitation old-school “Degrassi” actually is, which makes justifying all the offscreen exploitation that much harder. Ironically, the feature-length School’s Out, a curtain call that aired several months after “Degrassi High” called it quits, seemed to resonate with devotees and newbies alike as a result of circumventing camp earnestness, yet it’s only mentioned in passing over the closing credits of Degrassi: Whatever It Takes for its other claim to fame: dropping the f-bomb on Canadian airwaves. (At least it fares better than the short-lived “Degrassi Talks”, a teen advice show that’s been all but purged from the record.) Rideout’s M.O. is almost fatally elliptical–why exactly was Schuyler still “down the hall” from “Degrassi” writer Yan Moore, ready to hear his pitch for a reboot in those years where the franchise was dormant?–and entirely unconcerned with the politics of Canadian broadcasting. How did Schuyler and co. suddenly have money to build a tricked-out backlot that could accommodate every conceivable location for “Degrassi: The Next Generation”? Well, because they switched networks from the CBC to CTV locally and PBS to Nickelodeon stateside. That’s not a negligible piece of the puzzle–public and private funding determine content in radically different ways–but Rideout and Wong tend to more pressing matters, such as asking everybody about their first kiss. (Cue cloying montage of red faces and snorty laughs.)

I say “everybody,” although many key personnel are absent from this encore. As the stories of offscreen eating disorders, addictions, and creative resentments accumulate, the no-shows–Pat Mastroianni (“Joey Jeremiah”), Anais Granofsky (“Lucy Fernandez”), Adamo Ruggiero (“Marco Del Rossi”), Darrin Brown (“Dwayne Myers”), and Aislinn Paul (“Clare Edwards”), to name a few–begin to invite a perhaps unfair amount of speculation. Drake, a.k.a. Aubrey Graham (“Jimmy Brooks”), was clearly the filmmakers’ white whale. He humbles himself to the task here, claiming to have been a nerd and an outcast in his youth and confessing to a lingering crush on co-star Stacy Farber (not interviewed), but I preferred–as, apparently, did thousands of screaming girls circa the “Degrassi” mall tour–the company of his co-star Jake Epstein (“Craig Manning”), who ruminates on how the approach to abortion evolved across the various series and what that says about shifting cultural tides. In a 1989 episode of “Degrassi High”, the camera stayed outside the clinic. Fifteen years later, “Degrassi: The Next Generation” took us inside to detail the procedure, while “Degrassi: Next Class” dared to depict the abortion proper in 2017. This idea that “Degrassi” monitored the temperature of hot-button issues over a 37-year period is maybe the strongest argument we hear in favour of its indispensability.

I wish the filmmakers had been more confrontational with Schuyler; access comes at a price, I suppose. They seem to be following her lead in reducing her late partner Kit Hood, who co-directed Ida Makes a Movie and helmed 72 episodes of the ’80s and ’90s incarnations of “Degrassi” (as well as School’s Out), to a glorified footnote, a busboy Schuyler grew apart from, then replaced, professionally and romantically, with lawyer turned producer Stephen Stohn. There are also frequent cutaways to the cover of Schuyler’s autobiography that start to feel like a hyperlink to the full story below the fold. I did enjoy the cheeky inserts of Schuyler’s awards amid the curiosity about who profited the most from “Degrassi” 1.0, however, and she gets her hackles up now and again, indirectly dismissing Black actor Dayo Ade’s negative feelings about how his character BLT was written and styled, for instance, as a statistically inevitable fumble given the sheer volume of stories they were telling. (By contrast, costume designer Judy Shiner regrets imposing her whiteness on Ade.) Later, when Jordan Todosey (“Adam Torres”) admits to developing body dysmorphia from playing a trans boy during her own coming of age, Schuyler protests that 2010, the year the character debuted, was just too early to cast a trans actor in a trans role, even though breaking the rules in the name of vérité was once “Degrassi”‘s whole deal. In a way, Rideout’s documentary is the story of a proud second-wave feminist becoming another compromised Boomer (as reflected in the useless slickness of the show’s Netflix era), though that makes this uneasy mix of fluff, hagiography, and reckoning sound more hard-hitting than it is. Programme: Special Presentations