How do you fight it? We started our own radio station.

I will never forgive the teens and tweens of Noggin's target audience. They made a decision during the early double- zeroes: trashy composite sketches of a parent's worst nightmare or clever kids living the "making something out of abs. nothing in the suburbs"-dream. These, the teens weened on MTV's Laguna Screech and the post-90s Real World  ("A number of different people in a house doing abs. nothing productive. Let the drama begin!") wanted something like the new MTV but packaged for middle school.

And, actually, that was it: The Big D. Drama. (I'm going to start using we, because I am not excluded, being that I was a tween/teen in the early aughts.) We, for some reason, wanted to look into an awful sort-of mirror every Friday night. And, for awhile, it was fun... until this point of "I no longer know who the fuck I am supposed to have empathy for." Radio Free Roscoe was a respite from/foil to Degrassi: The Next Generation's batshit fucking insanity. Both did have golden nuggets of realism buried in some (brilliant) middle-aged writer's vision of teenagedom.

RFR's of course was much more generous: marginalized, "voiceless" high schoolers will, enterprisingly, find their voice. It entertains me to no end and comes as no surprise that it sprung from the same mind that spawned The Adventures of Pete and Pete. And watching it, I get this kind of embarrassing sense of physically being uplifted (see also: listening to an especially funny Earles and Jensen call, or Rasputin Secret Police's "The Sacred Cup.")

Fine line between precious and awesome. I dunno. That's all I have to say about that for now.