My brother and I looked forward to church every Sunday morning - or, more accurately, to getting out of church. Starting at eleven on Sunday morning, one of the local TV stations ran two episodes of Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High back to back, and if we could hustle our parents out of "coffee hour" in a timely enough fashion, we’d get home in time to see the second episode. (Summertime brought with it a respite from regular church services, which in turn meant that we could watch the entire hour of Degrassi programming uninterrupted by annoyances like religious observance.)

I don’t remember which one of us discovered Degrassi, or how - though if I had to guess, I’d lay odds on my brother; he ingested TV in such cancer-causing quantity that the entire family relied on him for accurate program scheduling information. Regardless, everything about the show tickled us. The exposure of the average New Jersey child to Canadian culture consists of the occasional Yankees-Blue Jays game, and Degrassi was our window into an alternate universe. Strange pronunciations given to words like "about" and "drama," outlandish insults which we promptly incorporated into our vocabulary ("Shut up, you narbo!" "You shut up, you broomhead!"), unfamiliar terms like "Grade Eight" - all these things proved irresistibly exotic.

If the allure of Canadian pop culture drew us in, the regrettable fashions modeled by the cast kept us coming up back. I hardly cut a stylish figure myself, and we got the reruns reasonably promptly in the States (I think I was about the same age as the oldest "Degrassi kids"), but I still couldn’t believe the clothes. The girls in particular boggled the mind; never in my life have I seen such aggressive accessorizing with scarves. I won’t mention Spike’s various hair-don’ts, or Joey Jeremiah’s prescient anticipation of Swingers chic, or Melanie’s tendency (shared by Kathleen) to attire herself in the garb of a fifties schoolmarm. I will, however, observe that acid-washed denim hung on a lot longer at Degrassi than it did in American high schools - and remember, we grew up in New Jersey - and that I wouldn’t have minded if Wheels wore looser jeans.

Accents and apparel aside, the Degrassi shows encompassed a high-school experience not only completely alien to my own but also completely different from any high school I’d ever seen represented on television. Degrassi had an element of reality, of sincerity, that fascinated me. Mercifully free of the customary preachiness of an ABC After-School Special, it still had all the hallmarks of a traditional soap opera, but without the odious Beautiful People; the boys had pimples, and the girls had hips, and neither of these things made them any less attractive to the opposite sex. I didn’t go to school with boys, but watching Degrassi, I felt like I grasped the basic essence of co-education. Plus, unlike most of my classmates, the kids at Degrassi seemed genuinely nice, most of them.

Of course, Degrassi managed to wedge enough "important issues" into its series run to tie up the 90210 writers for twice the time. My favorite episodes:

1. Spike gets pregnant. I think most people remember this one the most vividly. I can still recall the bleak light in the pharmacy where she buys her pregnancy test.

2. Erica gets pregnant and has an abortion. I always felt bad for her twin sister, Heather, in that episode, because Heather wanted to support Erica, but at the same time she sort of resented her for having more sexual experience, and in my high-school role as "Sarah, Pure As Driven Snow," I could so relate. Erica acted like a total beeotch in that episode, too.

3. The students spread rumors that one of their teachers is a lesbian. It pains me to admit this, but in seventh grade - pardon me, "Grade Seven" - my friends and I did that to teachers we didn’t like also. Not that it ever worked or anything, but still.

4. The father of Spike’s baby (Sean?) does acid, falls from a great height, and winds up in an irreversible coma. As if Spike didn’t have enough to deal with. At least she ended up meeting that cute Irish lad with the Pogues t-shirt.

5. L.D. gets cancer. I got misty whenever that one aired - the part where Lucy visits her in the hospital got me every time. In any case, L.D. ruled; I admired the way she waged a constant battle against chauvinism.

6. The Caitlin-Joey-Claude love triangle. Caitlin dates Joey but sort of starts seeing Claude; Caitlin dumps Joey to go out with Claude, but volunteers to work with Joey on a class project; Caitlin dumps Claude; Claude kills himself. My brother and I called Claude "Drone," because of his tiresome Green-Party blathering and silly goatee, and because for whatever reason we couldn’t ever remember his actual name. Still, we couldn’t believe he’d actually offed himself over Caitlin, who to tell the truth kind of chafed us.

7. Scott the football player uses "niner" Kathleen as a punching bag. Kathleen kind of chafed us too, but no way did she deserve that kind of abuse from a runt like Scott. (Scott had his uses, though, namely inspiring us to coin the term "gerbilicious" to describe his mustache.)

8. Wheels and vehicular homicide. First both his parents get killed in an auto accident; then he gets drunk in the finale and kills Lucy. Dude, figure it out.

9. Michelle’s parents get divorced. The main plot of this one didn’t stick in mind as much as the fact that her boyfriend, whom her father has forbidden her to see because he’s black, acts so understanding and sweet that I wanted to transfer to the mythical Degrassi immediately, since Toronto boys seemed to know how to treat their girlfriends.

10. Joey has to repeat Grade Eight. A pox upon ye, Mr. Raditch!

11. The adventures of Stephanie and Arthur. Yeah, yeah, Arthur had that crush on Caitlin (and now that I think about it, I found the wet-dream subtext in that episode kind of icky), but who could forget his older sib Stephanie, who took the word "scary" to a new level with the outfits she brought to school and changed in and out of so their strict parents wouldn’t find out she’d turned into a ho?

12. The musical stylings of The Zit Remedy, a.k.a. The Zits. "Everybody wants something," indeed. The episode in which The Zit Remedy makes its stunningly bad debut at the school dance rules, of course, but don’t underestimate the one in which The Zits shoot their stunningly even-worse video. Suffice it to say that Joey plays a guitar-strap keyboard, and that nut-wedgies do not get more flagrant than the one on Wheels.

13. Alexa and Simon knock it off with the PDA. Oh, wait, that never happened.

Sarah mixes it up about TV and more over at Tomato Nation.