Degrassi Is Already Working On Seasons 5 & 6 Of Next Class

Can’t see the video? Watch it here.

[THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT DNC: SEASON 4, WHICH WON’T AIR UNTIL SUMMER 2017]

I mentioned this at the end of my post about the “Degrassiland” podcast, but this news is worth mentioning again.

The Degrassi writers have begun their brainstorming meetings for Seasons 5 and 6 of Degrassi: Next Class. This is where they get together and throw out a ton of ideas for the upcoming year, and they’ll nail down exactly which stories they want to tell during the new season. Every 10 episodes is classified by Netflix as a “season,” but it’s important to understand that they’re actually working on 20 episodes at once. It’s the exact same format they’ve been following for years, where individual blocks of episodes within seasons have a standalone arc.

Season 5 is an important one because we know that a graduation is happening in Season 4, so there will be more cast turnover (and probably more character auditions to choose from compared to seasons 3 and 4).

Degrassi’s writers have gotten an unfair reputation for perceived fanservice and excessive pandering to specific groups of fans, and an overwhelming majority of that criticism is baseless. However, that argument now carries significantly less weight during the Next Class era. Unlike say Seasons 10 through the writing process of Season 13, where the writers could naturally get a ton of feedback because about two-thirds of the current season would air before they even started brainstorming for the next season, Next Class has them working on new episodes before viewers have even seen anything from the previous year’s two seasons.

That’s really the only significant change to the process from our point of view. If everything stays the same they’ll craft those stories over the winter, audition info will be announced around March, filming will happen over the summer and Seasons 5 & 6 will be released in 2018.