YMMV / Puberty Blues

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Bruce dies of a heroin overdose.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Judy Vickers. Is she a lovingly strict, protective mother who just wants the best for Debbie? Or is she a one-eyed hypocrite for sending Debbie to boarding school for having helped Cheryl get an abortion, and then letting Cheryl come and live with her as a daughter, showing her the love and acceptance that she didn't show her own daughter?
• Awesome Moments: When Debbie gives her speech at boarding school, openly admitting to the stupefied audience that she enjoys sex with her boyfriend, and that she sometimes smokes a joint to relax. She then whips out a joint and lights it in front of the crowd. It gets her expelled, as she intended.
• Awesome Music: Seventies hits play in every episode, including Aussie indie band Skyhooks.
• Tear Jerker: When Martin explains to David that if he is to join Scouts, he needs him to understand and follow some rules... namely, to refuse if an adult ever tells him to go into a tent alone with them, asks him to take his shorts off "to look for insect bites", or to do anything else that makes him uncomfortable. David is clearly at sea, but Martin's face says it all.
• Values Dissonance: It's the seventies, the series is full of them. Particularly drink driving, corporal punishment, drinking on the job, sexism and racism. Not to mention, all treatment of sexual mores. By today's standards, most of the boys in the gang are engaging in sexual abuse at best, and rape at worst. Not to mention that a high school teacher impregnates one of his students, and instead of being fired and criminally charged, he just marries her instead!
• The Woobie: For the teenagers, Freida, an unpopular girl who allows the boys to sexually abuse her. Among the adult crowd, Annie, Martin's co-worker, who falls in love with him after he leads her on, only for him to reject her, who and eventually drowns after having an epileptic fit and falling off her bike, into the ocean.

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