Summer is typically the time of year when TV has little to offer and we're forced to - ugh - go outside. Luckily, respite from the summer rain arrives in the form of Degrassi's summer season. The long-running teen series provides just the right amount of angst and drama to make these unsummerlike months bearable.While the viewers are just about to embark on the new episodes of Degrassi, the cast and crew have been hard at work for weeks to produce the coming season.
On a hot afternoon in Toronto, I travelled to the Degrassi set to peek in on the cast as they filmed scenes for the show's prom episodes, set to be shown later this year. (The prom's theme is Now or Never, which doesn't seem like the best thing to tell teens on prom night.) Between takes, recent Degrassi addition Munro Chambers is goofing around, practising all the different ways he can purposely deliver his lines with too much emotion. His character is too young for the prom, but attends as a waiter, he explains.
"I'm supposed to say, 'More bread?' But I've been saying it, 'Moooore breeeeeeead?' " Chambers says.
Chambers, who refuses to reveal his age but has the unbridled enthusiasm of a hyperactive 15-year-old, quickly became a fan favourite when he joined Degrassi in mid-2010 as Eli, the dark and tortured new boy still reeling from the untimely death of his girlfriend, Julia. His fans' devotion only grew as Eli entered a relationship with Clare (Aislinn Paul), and then began demonstrating quite a lot of instability around the end of last season, culminating in him crashing his hearse in a last-ditch attempt to win Clare's heart.
"He's going through a lot of stuff. I feel like, with Clare and the anniversary of Julia's death, there's so much going on in Eli's head that people have no idea about," Chambers says. "He has a lot of demons to deal with and there are a lot of dark places we'll see him go, for better or for worse. People thought Eli was crazy before? You'll need to wait and see."
Paul, as the other half of that popular Degrassi relationship, is a little more forgiving of how Clare and Eli will fare this season.
"She's still trying to figure out her feelings after the Eli breakup," says Paul. "Clare and Eli will always be in each others' lives, and she knows that he'll always be important to her, but it's important for her right now to separate herself from him and move on."
At only 17, Paul is the veteran of the current Degrassi cast, having made her first guest appearance in 2006. But even after several years of experience on the show, Paul says she was shocked by how much fans love the Clare and Eli storyline.
"It happened so quickly," she remembers. "Everyone just loved them. At the same time, though, it's kind of expected, because Eli is the mysterious, damaged boy, and you know how much young girls hate that kind of thing," Paul says, raising one of her eyebrows.
As the prom scenes are being filmed, Raymond Ablack arrives backstage on his second-last day of filming before his character exits the show for good; the 21-year-old is sporting a full beard and is looking very grown-up, a far cry from when he first began playing Sav Bhandari in 2007. Still, he says, he never quite felt like a Degrassi veteran.
"I always felt like the new kid; I've never quite felt like this is old hat or that I'm an old pro," Ablack says. "Maybe today I feel like it, because I'm about to leave, so I must not be that new any more. But it still feels like I just got here.
I don't think it's going to hit me [that I've left Degrassi] until weeks from now. Once a month passes, and I haven't come back to the set, but then I see on Facebook that all of my friends are back here filming again, then I'll feel really sad."
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