My So-Called Life (1994-1995)

 

Watching (and adoring) Winnie Holzman’s Huge inspired me to break out my DVDs of this mid-90s teen drama she penned and remember how much I enjoy it.  Seeing it again after Huge, plenty of similar building blocks stand out:  naturalistic-sounding teen dialogue, lovably flawed characters, and rich exploration of dramatic subjects.  Another similarity is of course the painfully-short life – one season is all we ever got.

 

My So-Called Life centers around 15-year-old Angela Chase.  She’s reached that difficult age when she’s finally a teenager but doesn’t always feel like it.  She’s intelligent, soulful, and introspective, but she’s also naïve, dramatic, and myopic.  Family, friends, and love bring her joy and heartbreak in equal, sometimes simultaneous, measures, and she confusedly attempts to sort through it all.

 

Angela is played by a very young Claire Danes, so relatable it makes you squirm at times.  Another familiar face, Jared Leto (who most recently won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club,) appears as Jared, the object of Angela’s idealized affections.  A.J. Langer and Wilson Cruz steal the already well-performed show as Angela’s friends Rayanne and Rickie.  Rayanne is That Girl, the one mothers don’t want their daughters befriending.  She drinks too much, doesn’t care about school, and sleeps around; however, she adores Angela and her “perfect” life as much as Angela craves Rayanne’s adventurous sense of abandon.  We could call Rickie a precursor to Alistair on Huge, but at the time the series was made, he was a class of his own as a gay Latino boy on a teen show.  He’s completely figured out who he is but still isn’t sure what means for him or where he fits.  He’s a sweet kid, a perennial peacemaker who probably looks after Rayanne with more care than anyone else in her life. 

 

One of My So-Called Life’s biggest strengths is that, even though Angela and her fellow sophomores are the main focus, theirs isn’t the only perspective we get.  Angela’s parents are just as well-drawn as she is, and they have plenty of their own meaty plots.  Some of it involves Angela – how they relate to her, how they struggle to reach her, how they worry for her – while other stories deal with work or their relationships with one another.

 

But like I said, the show is primarily about teenagers, and so the A-plots mainly revolve around teen issues.  Stories of love, like wrestling with how to respond to sexual pressure.  Stories of family, like reconciling who you’re becoming with how your parents still see you.  Stories of friendship, like painfully negotiating relationships that have drifted apart since middle school.  Internal struggles about insecurity and fear and loneliness, and external struggles about gossip and homework and rejection.  The subjects are nothing I haven’t seen before, but they’re depicted with such specificity, with such genuine feeling, that the storylines are elevated into something special.  It’s really too bad we couldn’t have had more time with these characters and their lives.

 

Warnings

 

A little swearing, sexual discussion and references, substance abuse, and some heavy thematic elements.