Whenever I'm feeling particularly emotionally vulnerable or generally fed up, I tend to retreat to the things of childhood, as if I can recapture the feelings of security and satisfaction that I felt at that age simply by watching the TV shows or reading the books that I watched and read then. This time, God help me, it's
Heartbreak High. And, being me, this sparked musings and meta.
When I think of Australian TV shows from the '90s,* I often mock them for their earnest PC-ness. Their casts were ethnically and otherwise diverse (
Lift-Off, for example, had six main child characters. One girl was of Vietnamese origin. One boy was I think of Latin-American origin. One boy and one girl were black, and one boy and one girl were white. One of the boys was also deaf). They were obvious and
anvillicious in their moral messages, which were usually about seeing the common humanity in everyone, standing up to bullies, or coming together to solve problems. They tended to have a strong environmental focus, too.
It's easy to make fun of these shows, because they are so obvious about what they are doing, and there's a certain sense of didacticism, of trying too hard. And of course we're supposed to be above that, praising subtlety, viewing things at an ironic remove. There's a suspicion of heavy-handed messages.
But I'm wondering now if all this is such a bad thing. We talk a lot in fandom about having truly diverse, truly representative media. I think the overall aim should be to get to a point beyond tokenism, where the stories of all are given equal weight and attention, regardless of sex, race, gender, class, sexual orientation or (dis)ability. What I can't work out, though, is whether these heavy-handed shows of the '90s are a stepping-stone towards the kind of representation I want, or whether they are a sad reminder of how things have declined.
Because the sad truth is that - dreadful writing aside - shows like
Heartbreak High do a better job of representing the true diversity of multicultural countries like Australia than a lot of stuff on TV now. (The characters in the first season, for example, come from Greek, Lebanese, Italian, El Salvadoran, Vietnamese and Anglo Australian backgrounds, and these are added to with characters of Balkan origin. There are also canonically gay characters, although this being the mid-90s, they don't get to have on-screen relationships. If they only had added characters of Chinese, Pacific Islander and Turkish background and Indigenous characters, they probably would've got a pretty accurate representation of a state school in Sydney in the '90s, although considering it appears to be set in an outer suburb in the southwest (just going by the look of the school and the surrounding area) they've got the demographics pretty much right.) And how depressing is it that we seem to have got worse at representation in the past 15 years.**
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* It's not just Australian shows, and not just '90s shows either. The perfect example of this is of course
Degrassi, which began in the '80s and is Canadian. I've noticed a lot of parallels in Australian and Canadian culture over the years, and this is definitely one of them, although I'm not sure whether this was a more widely-spread phenomenon.
** One thing I'm not sure about is whether I'm making a fair comparison, because what I watched back in the '90s were, for the most part, Australian shows aimed at teenagers, and what I watch now are mostly American shows aimed at the 18-35 demographic. I feel that it's significant that the only truly diverse shows I watch,
Avatar: The Last Airbender and its spin-off
The Legend of Korra, are aimed at children. Are content-creators less cautious when they're writing material for children? Do they think adults are less likely to watch shows that are truly representative?
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