Television is no place for children. Between Teen Mom, Toddlers & Tiaras and Dance Moms, we cringe for those poor kids who are clearly growing up in dysfunctional homes. But as bad as it is to be forced into pageantry or to have Amber Portwood as your mother, at least reality kids don't have it quite has awful as many of the tykes on scripted series. Here are the ones that really need to have a fictional Child Protective Services intervene on their behalf:

Tags: breaking bad, community, Degrassi, falling skies, glee, gossip girl, grey's anatomy, mad men, true blood

We're still depressed about the end of Friday Night Lights and then we started watching the new "Now or Never" arc of Degrassi only to see a very familiar plot from being played out on the teen show. Now we loved FNL, and we love Degrassi, but FNL did make a major misstep with one little tiny murder storyline that dragged down its second season. Out of all the fantastic issues that Lights tackled, why, oh why, did Degrassi choose that one?

Tags: degrassi, degrassi now or never, friday night lights

Over the course of a few seasons, Glee has gone from a fun teen show with music to a jukebox show with plots and characters that make little to no sense. And while the long-running Degrassi franchise has hit some tough patches of its own over the years, they've managed to stick through it all (even adding occasional music), successfully entertaining and educating several generations teens since the mid-'80s. If Glee wants to last anywhere near that long (and God help us if it does), there's plenty that it could learn from our favorite neighbors to the north:

Tags: degrassi, glee

For that small group of people who make up that cute little crossover audience between USA Network and [adult swim], today is your day.

Tags: Covert Affairs, Degrassi, Royal Pains, South Riding, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job

I was slightly worried about the new format of Degrassi, in which the TeenNick show goes from a weekly series and turns into a show that airs four nights a week. I thought it might be overkill, especially given that fact that while I've watched the show since I was a teenager (back when now-Principal Snake was just a student himself) my interest in the show had started to wane in the last season. The plots were sort of simple and ground that the show had covered before, or just mere placeholders until favorites like Manny or Emma or Marco could return for an episode. However, with "The Boiling Point" (the moniker for this nightly-serialized run) has really upped the ante and renewed my interest in the show. Here's why....

Tags: degrassi

There's been a lot of debate recently about whether MTV's Skins actually represents "real" teenage life and what sort of supposedly terrible example it's setting, but judging by the rest of the television landscape, there could be a lot worse places to send your fictional children to school. Here's our ranking of TV's least educational institutions of learning:

Tags: 90210, degrassi, glee, gossip girl, hellcats, modern family, no ordinary family, pretty little liars, twop 10