Striking a Nerve

A teenage boy howls in pain in "Hard," an episode of the CBC teen show Nerve.

A young adult stands in front of a teen-show camera and announces, "My name is Alex, and I'm about to get my balls waxed!" — at which point the camera pans down a black T-shirt to the kid's blue-jeaned crotch.

It's a set-up, you figure. This Alex guy will turn out to be a juvenile bowling champ. Next we'll find him at Jimmy's Rock 'n' Bowl, Brunswick ball in hand, a comic payoff that will be greeted with a mocking trumpet slur: wanh-wanh-wanh-wahhhhhh.

But no, Alex really is going to get his testicles depilated. And he's bringing a crew from the CBC's Nerve into the clinic with him.

"Um, this is your first time to have them done?" whispers Peter the esthetician. As it happens, Alex shaves down there pretty well every week. This is his first wax, though. Don't worry, Peter tells him. Just stay loose — relax.

"Are you relaxed?" an off-camera journalist asks as Peter uses a brush to lather Alex's privates with hot resin.

"Not a hundred percent," Alex acknowledges. "But he seems to know what he's doing and I trust him so — " which is the exact moment when the esthetician rips the bandage off and Alex's mouth jumps open wide enough to accommodate a loaf of bread.

The segment is part of an April episode of Nerve devoted to a single theme: "Hard." In the same half-hour, 20-year-old Michelle will explain the difficulties of kicking hard drugs, while members of the 20-something punk group Riot 99 discuss the challenge of growing up without growing old.

There are no last names on the show. No hosts or (visible) journalists, either. And while Nerve tells the story of teenagers from across Canada, there is little effort made to identify the cities they come from. The point being, perhaps, that teenage life is the same everywhere, that adolescence is a place unto itself.

Nerve, which airs late afternoon on Mondays, represents a dramatic change in the way we entertain young audiences. Many notable Canadian performers began on regional kid shows. Peter Jennings and Alanis Morissette started on Ottawa programs (Saturday Date, You Can’t Do That on Television). Anne Murray made her TV premiere on Let's Go, a '60s pop-pourri made in Halifax; Mike Myers was in Range Ryder and the Calgary Kid. Street Cents, the CBC's long-running consumer show for teens, is where Jonathan Torrens (Jonovision, Trailer Park Boys) got his start.

That Nerve features no hosts means that Canadian teenagers are the show’s stars. The music, which is industrial strength, further contributes to an unsupervised party vibe, as does the show's humour, which comes at you like spitballs from the back of the bus.

There are probably parents and educators who wish that Nerve would stick to more traditional, obviously nutritional, kids programming — something like Reach for the Top, the legendary high-school quiz show that ran for nearly 20 years and appeared in almost precisely the same time slot as Nerve.

Host Terry Garner (right) congratulates encylopedia-winning contestants on Reach for the Top.

I would remind them that CBC finally cancelled Reach when audience research indicated the program wasn't reaching its intended demographic, and that 57 per cent of the audience was 55 years of age and older. Nerve successfully reinvents the kids show by abandoning the instructional pose adopted by so many previous teen series. The show feels more like a visit from a friend than a meeting with an after-school tutor.

Next Monday’s episode of Nerve is a good example of how the series tweaks its players or occasionally breaks into uncontrollable giggles. Entitled "What Are You Afraid Of?" the program offers a typically brash opener: a beach party with college kids playing beer darts. Contestants fire the darts at beer cans pressed against a heavy cooler. Once punctured, the beer must be downed from the gushing wound. The guy players, growing tipsy, profess to be afraid of catching a dart in the eye. As for the girls, they say they're afraid (and more than a little bored) because, after a few lanced beers, the boys seem more interested in each other.

After beer darts, a beleaguered couple jumps on screen. They're both afraid of falling asleep. The girl confesses that monsters with claws come for her when she finally, late in the evening, loses the battle to stay awake. So what happens at the end of her speech? As soon as she blinks, a computer-generated claw rises up and wipes her off the screen.

Next we meet Andrew, who asks, "How did I become a funeral director? Well, I just saw an ad in the newspaper like any other job." After the camera pauses to capture a chilling "No Exit" sign above the door, we follow young Andrew into the preparation room, where he talks with appropriate wonder about his chosen profession. While he talks, a screen blurb advises us, "The embalmer relieves rigor mortis by flexing, bending and massaging the arms and legs."

Brrrrr, where do you go from there? Nerve follows with this particular show's best spitball, a delightful bit of animation that has a schoolboy becoming aroused by a female desk mate, only to have the teacher call him to the board to solve a math equation that is almost as hard as the problem in his pants.

Like most good TV series, you can tell the creators of Nerve have fun making the show. It's something new in Canadian TV programming — experimental, democratic, curious. At its best, Nerve creates the illusion that the show is talking with kids, as opposed to at them.

Indeed, the best interludes are scenes where teenagers capture the perplexities of adolescence with a throwaway observation. On the "What Are You Afraid Of?" show, that moment comes when a girl sighs, "I'm scared [most of the time] that I'm going to think too much about the future and I'm not going to have any fun right now." A frown creases her brow. "Then other times I'm scared I'm having too much fun and I'm not going to have a future." Nerve reflects today's youth in a manner so obvious and straightforward, you wonder why no one has tried it before: it simply allows young adults to speak for themselves.

Nerve airs Monday nights at 5:30 p.m. on CBC TV.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.