W hen I was seven , I committed one of my first conscious acts of rebellion: I snuck down to the basement to watch Beverly Hills, In the first episode I saw, teenagers Kelly Taylor, a sultry blonde, and taciturn, James Deanβlite bad boy Dylan McKay gave in to their lust while Brenda Walsh, Dylan's girlfriend and Kelly's best friend, studied in Paris for a semester.
Rapt and slightly scandalized, I watched the couple make out in a pool, surrounded by tendrils of steam and accompanied by insistent, sexy synthesizer bleats.
This watershed moment in my nascent televisual education sparked a decade-long obsession with teen TV. As a child, I thought of my fixation on '90s high school soaps such as Beverly Hills, and Dawson's Creek as a utilitarian exercise, prep work for my future.
I watched them dutifully and dispassionately, certain that this was how my own high school experience would play out: angst filled, conflict heavy, and full of salacious encounters. Clandestine viewing sessions, however, turned out to be among my few transgressive acts. I was a nauseatingly boring teen, not unlike the nauseatingly boring adult I have become: bookish, bespectacled, awkward, responsible.
Television's muscled quarterbacks and willowy cheerleaders led lives propelled by sex, betrayal, and quippy bons mots, not at all like the cud-chewing monotony of my own contentedly dull existence. These characters were foreign to meβand magnetic. Although now a respectable adult, I religiously follow the genre's latest iterations, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars. Predating these glamorous modern-day Douglas Sirk melodramas minus the Sirkian irony was Degrassi. The humble teen series, which began as Degrassi Junior High and followed its characters into Degrassi High , ran on CBC from to another sequel, Degrassi: The Next Generation , began in and is in its twelfth season.
