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.
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