MY SO-CALLED LIFE
How TV’S most authentic teen drama only lasted one season
If they had polls for the Greatest tv Show title Of all time, My So-called Life
would surely be up there ( just behind ’Allo ’Allo) . the stroke of genius is the ‘So-called’. While you can easily imagine a worthy, preachy, self-absorbed teen drama called My Life, the “So-called” absolutely gets at the knowing, distanced, introspective quality that made it resonate so deeply. the show debuted on ABC on august 25 1994, just three weeks after Kurt Cobain’s suicide and quickly provided weekly 49-minute chunks of relatable solace for an inconsolable teen populace. existing in the gap between Beverly Hills 90210 and Dawson’s Creek, it had the soap of the former, the smarts of the latter and a veracity all of its own. and it never made it past the first season.
although initiated by Thirtysomething
producer Marshall herskovitz as a teenage boy drama called Secret/seventeen, MSCL
evolved into a passion project for writer Winnie holzman (she later wrote the libretti for Wicked) who parlayed her own experiences into something unheard of at the time: a drama with a teenage girl at the heart of it. Playing here on Channel 4, MSCL
focused on the identity crisis of clever, sensitive, Pennsylvania high-schooler angela Chase (Claire danes) moving from one set of friends to a new cooler clique — chiefly, braided wild-child Rayanne Graff (aj Langer) and effeminate Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) — to reinvent herself. Of course there is a boy, dreamy object of obsession Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) but really it’s about escaping the personality defined by your parents and discovering the real you.
Rather than chase Color Me Badd around hotel corridors á la Beverly Hills 90210, the plot-lines were mostly small and recognisable, the ebb and flow of friendships, the pleasures and pains of liking someone, the rush to tidy up a house before the parents get home. the show’s strengths were holzman’s generous, sharp but naturalistic writing (“People are always saying you should be yourself, like ‘yourself’ is this definite thing, like a toaster.”), the air of believability — costume designer Patrick R Norris gave each actor one closet to preserve the realism of repetition — and a great ensemble led by danes. Pipping a preClueless alicia Silverstone to the role, danes made for a believable everygirl, switching between awkward and luminous on a dime.
the show only ran for 19 episodes but still managed to break new ground. Rickie Vasquez was the first openly gay teenager on US television. It was a primetime tv show that openly discussed teen sex, even if actually doing it wasn’t high on angela’s agenda. It also gave nearly as much screen time to the adults as to the teens. this focus was as much out of practical necessity as an artistic choice— danes was just 13 when she
shot the pilot and could only work limited hours on set — but even in this regard MSCL changed things up. Angela’s parents, Patty and Graham, swapped traditional gender roles — he stayed at home, she was the breadwinner — and the show had the wisdom to know that establishing identity doesn’t stop at adolescence; it’s a lifelong struggle.
Still, Angela Chase’s so-called life ended on 15 May 1995, just four months after the last episode aired. The scheduling demands of shooting a weekly series had taken a toll on Danes who told Herskovitz that if the show was renewed for a second season, she didn’t want to be involved. Yet, as Danes later recalled, she didn’t have the clout to end the show on her own. The real reason ABC pulled the plug was cited as its “far too narrow” appeal (but this might partly be because it was up against Friends, which attracted nearly four times its viewers). The show garnered critical kudos, Emmy success and even the first online campaign to save a TV show — groups with names like Operation Life Support used technology to ‘flame’ executives — but its time was up.
In some ways, the show suffered for being ahead of his time. MSCL pre-empted and influenced the explosion of teen TV in general (Dawson’s Creek, The OC, One Tree Hill and its spiritual successor Freaks And Geeks — also a one-season casualty) and female-led teen drama in particular (Felicity, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, Daria and Buffy). But there’s still an argument that MSCL is better than all of them — partly perhaps because it never grew up. “There was a rightness in how short the season was,” reflected Holzman. “This was a show about adolescence and sort of ended in its own adolescence. There was an aura about how short the series was like all things that die young. The show ended at a point that it was still all potential.” Angela Chase, we hardly knew you. MY SO-CALLED LIFE IS AVAILABLE TO BUY ON AMAZON AMAZON VIDEO AND AT SKY STORE