The Craig-Ashley-Manny love triangle is what drew Kevin Smith — the 34-year-old writer and director of ”Clerks” and ”Chasing Amy” and a longtime fan of the show’s earlier incarnations — to the current ”Degrassi.” Now Smith is guest-starring as himself and as his cult alter ego, Silent Bob — half the stoner-comic duo of Smith’s hit movie ”Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” — in a three-episode arc. Sitting at a picnic table outside the studio, waiting to shoot his own prom scenes, Smith marveled at the creative freedom Linda Schuyler enjoys. ”How awesome would it be to have your own universe, where you’re telling ongoing stories, and everything is within the confines of this piece of property?” he remarked, smiling almost sweetly. Smith, who himself manages a highly entrepreneurial universe (acting, writing comic books and scripts, running four popular Web sites, selling action figures of himself), explained the long-running appeal of ”Degrassi” in indie-music terms. ”The garage-band ideal is where I present something to you and say, ‘You’ve got to check this out,’ ” he said. ” ‘Degrassi’ still has that. You can still tell more people than not about the show, and they’re like, ‘I’ve never heard about it.’ Fans aren’t threatened by its popularity.”

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”We needed someone to come in and shake things up,” Mistysyn said, as she waited to be called to the set where she’d be shooting scenes with Kevin Smith. Smith says he fell in love with Caitlin 15 years ago, when he was just a real-life convenience-store clerk. The three-episode arc — in which Smith directs a ”Jay and Silent Bob” movie, using ”Degrassi” as a production set — won’t be shown in the United States until this summer, but it has already brought an abundance of grown-up press to the show in Canada. For his part, Smith is happily plugging ”Degrassi” in sold-out speaking engagements and on his wildly popular View Askew Web site.