On Degrassi, Reality Is No Match For Young Love

Part of making the more-than-slightly shameful choice to continue watching teen dramas when you're pushing forty is accepting that producers of such shows will use young/secret marriage to goose the stakes of a storyline far more often than such marriages actually occur among the real teen population. And yes, I know that my beloved Beverly Hills, 90210 was part of the problem when Brenda got most of the way down the aisle in Las Vegas with Stuart, but I feel like Brenda Hampton is responsible for mainstreaming the notion of otherwise normal upper-middle-class suburban kids getting married in high school, both on 7th Heaven and the even weirder The Secret Life Of The American Teenager, and after an earlier aborted elopement (see link above), Degrassi pulled the trigger last night, as Ali married Leo. BUT COME ON.

So after weeks (maybe months? I don't know how much Degrassi time passed in the hiatus) of dating, Leo tells Ali that his credits didn't actually transfer, so he's going to have to return to France. But Ali is so crazy in love that she impetuously proposes, in the middle of the night, so that Leo will be able to immigrate legally and remain in Canada. This decision is taken at midnight.

And yet, by the time Ali gets to school, she's already purchased "Will You Be My Bridesmaid?" cards for Clare and Jenna...

...which I have to think would have required more than one stop at specialty stationery stores that are open before 8:30 AM because you can't just grab something that specific and obscure from the drug store.

But okay, fine. Then Ali and Leo go get married, presumably at Toronto City Hall. Let's assume that the organized Ali thought to save time by filling out the license application online. Let's assume there was no wait at all at the window to get said license. Let's even give producers the benefit of the doubt that there was a cancellation at one of the City Hall wedding chambers so that they could slide right in, however unlikely that is, which is very. The city does not provide an officiant with the chamber! They'd have to go mooch around to some other wedding's officiant who might still be hanging around and beg him or her to do it — plus mooch a couple of witnesses. And after all this running around, the whole day somehow isn't shot? Ali is planning to go back to school?

Of course, this is all on top of the biggest strains on the viewer's suspension of disbelief, which are (a) that Ali would stay with a guy who hit her; (b) that he would stop hitting her long enough to lull her into a false sense of security and win over her friends; (c) that she would still be so besotted that she'd think he's marriage material; and (d) that she'd have forgotten about his controlling nature and convinced herself that he'd be okay being in a secret marriage with her, particularly given that (e) she's still planning to attend MIT even though even if he could get a spouse visa, he wouldn't be able to work in the U.S.

But seriously, Google the wedding thing, Degrassi writers! It would not have been that hard just to have sent them to Niagara Falls!