‘Degrassi’ creator Linda Schuyler on her memoir ‘The Mother of All Degrassi’ — the hardest part to write was the title

It’s entirely possible the seed that grew into a pioneering career in Canadian television and the beloved “Degrassi” TV franchise was planted in a devastating car crash on an English motorway in 1968.

“Degrassi” co-creator Linda Schuyler, then a young woman of 20 on a gap-year trip, was in a car that collided with a double-decker bus, killing the two young men in the front seat and leaving Schuyler with injuries that would have lifelong physical and emotional repercussions.

Schuyler can’t say if the crash led to her 40-plus-year career, although she asks the question in her memoir, “The Mother of All Degrassi.”

“It was the accident that had ultimately allowed me to reboot my life,” she writes. “The crash led me to teacher’s college. During my years of teaching I learned the importance of empowering young people, and became compelled to tell their stories … Reflecting on this throughline of my life leads me to the unanswerable question that has haunted me for years — would ‘Degrassi’ have existed without my head-on collision?”

Considering how much seemed to flow from that truly life-altering tragedy it’s surprising to hear Schuyler say the accident nearly didn’t make it into the book, which was released in November.

“My husband (entertainment lawyer Stephen Stohn) was reading a draft and he said, ‘Well, Linda, you’re not talking about the car accident.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know, but nobody needs to hear about that.’ But then, when you think about it … the cards that life has dealt me have come from that,” Schuyler says during a Zoom interview.

It’s also somewhat surprising to hear that the story of the accident, which Schuyler recounts without belabouring the horror of it, wasn’t the most difficult part to write.

“I think the hardest words I had to write were the title, because I didn’t feel like I had the right to own the word ‘mother,’” says Schuyler.

The woman who fostered the careers of dozens and dozens of child actors and shepherded their fictional counterparts through their screen adolescences never had a child of her own because of endometriosis that appears to have been caused by scar tissue from the crash.

It was Yan Moore, Schuyler’s writing partner on numerous “Degrassi” scripts, who suggested the book’s title, but “I said, ‘Oh Yan, I can’t. I’m not a mom.’ And he made me think about it, that you don’t necessarily have to have your own children; you can nurture in other ways,” Schuyler says.

She would frequently tell the writers of “Degrassi”: “Go deeper, give me more. Keep it authentic. Don’t hold back. Don’t be sensational, but give me the real stuff. And I kind of had to give myself the talk that I would give my ‘Degrassi’ writers, to give myself permission to sort of keep digging.”

‘You’d probably get arrested’

The spark for “Degrassi” was lit, appropriately enough, by kids in a classroom.

Schuyler never wanted to be a teacher — although she calls teaching a “noble profession” — but teachers’ college seemed her best option when she returned to Canada from England post-accident.

“I found out that I was a natural. I enjoyed working with young people. I enjoyed helping people learn,” she says.

She also enjoyed learning from them, which is how her first production came to be: a documentary called “Between Two Worlds” starring her students, immigrants and children of immigrants at Toronto’s Earl Grey Senior Public School. (Schuyler was an immigrant herself, moving from England to Paris, Ont., with her family as a child of eight.)

The short film that would become the first episode of “The Kids of Degrassi Street” in 1979 was inspired by a children’s book in Earl Grey’s library, “Ida Makes a Movie.”

After Schuyler bought the rights to the book, the cat characters of “Ida” became human children at the urging of a distributor who said the market was flooded with animation. But that meant casting child actors.

A sandwich board with the handmade sign “Kids wanted” was erected in front of the Queen Street East headquarters of Playing With Time, the production company Schuyler started in 1976, the year before she left teaching, with then personal and professional partner Kit Hood.

These days, “you’d probably get arrested for putting a sign out in front of your office saying ‘Kids wanted,’” laughs Schuyler. “It’s extraordinary that we got away with it. It was just a different time … The streetcar used to stop right in front of our office at 935 Queen and kids would come off the streetcar, knock on the door: ‘Oh, man, what do you mean kids wanted? Can I be one of your kids?’”

There were a lot of kids between 1979 and 2017, as “The Kids of Degrassi Street” begat “Degrassi Junior High,” “Degrassi High,” “Degrassi: The Next Generation” and “Degrassi: Next Class”: five shows and more than 500 episodes of television.

The recruiting methods eventually became more professional (and after the end of her relationship with Hood, Schuyler started a new company, Epitome Pictures), but one thing never changed: casting age-appropriate actors.

Schuyler doesn’t fault producers who cast adults as teenagers. She understands the implications of casting kids: shorter hours on set, accommodating chaperones, having to provide schooling while shooting.

“There’s no question that dealing with the logistics of production is harder when your cast is age appropriate,” she says. And “you can find very cute 25-year-olds who look 15 … but when that camera is on that face, it’s capturing 10 more years of life experience whether you like it or not.”

‘The young cast helped keep us honest’

For Schuyler, casting 15-year-olds to play 15-year-olds isn’t just about what the audience sees onscreen.

Over the years, the “Degrassi” franchise has been praised — and sometimes vilified — for tackling hard-hitting subjects in a way that didn’t condescend to the experiences of its young characters or audiences, everything from bullying (with which Schuyler had personal experience) to school shootings; teen pregnancy and abortion (in three different shows), sexual violence, gay bashing, and transgender and non-binary storylines, to name just some.

And part of keeping those stories authentic was getting feedback from the young cast members.

During read-throughs of the scripts, “we got their spontaneous reaction to what was happening to the characters. And some of them would say things like, ‘Oh my God, at school something like this just happened to me, only they said this’ or ‘I don’t believe that character saying that.’

“I don’t ever want anyone to think that the kids wrote the scripts. I had very professional writers who really knew how to craft a good story, but the young cast helped keep us honest and on point,” Schuyler says.

Schuyler — who, with Stohn, sold Epitome to DHX Media (now WildBrain) in 2014 and hasn’t been involved with a “Degrassi” show since “Next Class” ended in 2017 — says she misses her “always lively and enlightening” discussions with the actors. And it’s clear she still cares about the kids.

She starts the interview by saying how pleased she is to see that Stacey Farber, who played Ellie in eight seasons of “The Next Generation,” is leading a new TV series, the detective comedy-drama “The Spencer Sisters.”

Farber is mentioned in the book, as are other “Degrassi” cast members including, yes, Drake, a.k.a. Aubrey Graham, who played Jimmy in “The Next Generation.”

So is Neil Hope, who died in 2007 at the age of 35, although his death wasn’t revealed until 2012. He played Griff in “The Kids of Degrassi,” and Wheels in “Degrassi Junior High,” “Degrassi High” and “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”

Schuyler writes that Neil often stayed with her and Hood on the nights his father was drinking and also after his dad died from complications of diabetes and alcohol abuse. The last time she saw Neil, during production of “The Next Generation,” he revealed he too had diabetes but told her he was going to quit drinking. Schuyler gave him her cell number and they promised to keep in touch.

“My main goal for the ‘Degrassi’ franchise was to reassure young people that they were not alone, yet, despite my professional intentions and the long-standing friendship that Neil and I shared, he’d died alone. I felt that I had failed him,” Schuyler writes.

‘The grandma watching from the sidelines’

That’s not the only place in the book Schuyler writes about a sense of failure.

There were times when due to self-doubt and setbacks she tried to quit the TV business all together, but she kept getting pulled back in by her passion for storytelling; and not just by “Degrassi,” but by other shows she had a hand in creating, including “Liberty Street,” “Riverdale,” “Instant Star” and “The L.A. Complex.”

While Schuyler was shaping shows she was also helping shape the independent Canadian production industry.

“In those days, I think I was probably the only female out there in Canada, (but) we were all pioneering, really, and broadcasters were just coming to terms with this notion of buying from an independent producer. So not only was ‘Degrassi’ being formed, but so was all the bedrock for the independent producing community in Canada.”

There are, for the moment, no new “Degrassi” episodes airing or streaming, but that hasn’t put a dent in the series’ cultural impact.

“What I do know from the WildBrain people is that, first of all, there’s a bigger audience right now for ‘Degrassi’ than there’s ever been,” Schuyler says. “Kids are watching it on all kinds of streaming devices, YouTube, there’s ‘Degrassi’ channels. So what I’ve heard from WildBrain is even though the HBO Max deal was a false start, they are committed to developing and finding a home for new ‘Degrassi.’”

She’s referring to the news in November that HBO Max had pulled out of a planned “Degrassi” reboot, one of several high-profile cancellations prompted by the merger of Warner Bros and Discovery.

When the franchise does pick up again, “that will be an odd one for me because I’ll be the grandma watching from the sidelines,” Schuyler says.

I ask her if she feels she can take credit for what she wrought with “Degrassi.”

“I had a strong sense of vision and a strong sense of purpose for the series,” she says. “I do know that if you distil ‘Degrassi’ down to its basic core, it’s about engagement, enlightenment, empowerment. And I see those words in that order.

“I think there’s a clarity of that vision throughout the whole franchise that began in the roots of my very first documentary when I was a schoolteacher. But it’s there from ‘Ida Makes a Movie’ right through. That’s why I think we were able to have such longevity … and I say we because it’s not just me being smart. It’s having a smart team around me, my writers in particular, but also my production team.”

Schuyler might be retired from turning the everyday lives of children and youth into beloved TV, but kids are still on her mind.

Just before we sign off, I ask if there’s anything she wants to add. She says she is giving author proceeds from “The Mother of All Degrassi” to Kids Help Phone, “because they’ve just launched a huge initiative, which they call the largest initiative for youth mental health that we’ve ever seen in Canada. And you’re probably aware, as I am, that after this pandemic we had the second pandemic of mental health … If — when — the new ‘Degrassi’ comes, I’m sure they’ll be looking at it as well.”

Debra Yeo is a deputy editor and a contributor to the Star’s Culture section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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