My So-Called Life

“My So-Called Life” (1994-1995) was an American television show that appeared on ABC from August 1994 to January 1995. It starred Claire Danes as Angela Chase, a 15-year-old  girl growing up in a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh.

What made it good was that it was much truer to life than most of television, showing what it is like to be 14 or 15. The show still holds up more than ten years later. It has some of the depth of a good book and, like a good book, you come away seeing the world a bit more deeply.

The show only lasted a season: Claire Danes wanted to break into film. The show also had low ratings: there were some 99 shows on television that had more viewers than it did!

“My So-Called Life” was the brainchild of Winnie Holzman (who appears as Mrs Krzyzanowski in the show), Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. They had worked together on “thirtysomething” (1987-1991) and so ABC hoped they could come up with another show just as good. ABC gave them complete freedom – which, while common for HBO, was rare for ABC.

Holzman and company wanted to show the real life a 15-year-old girl, not the very unreal picture you get elsewhere on television, like on “90210.” But, like Newton Minow who called television a “vast wasteland”, Holzman failed to understand that television is closer to beer than books: most watch television to escape.

As in “thirtysomething”, most characters think only of themselves, living in unending confusion and self-doubt.

Holzman herself is an award-wining poet. This makes Angela much better at expressing herself than most 15-year-olds. Even with, like, her overuse of, like, the word “like”.

For example, when asked about whether Jordan, a boy she was interested in, was a good kisser, Angela said:

They weren’t the kind of kisses you could actually evaluate. They were more like – introductory kisses.

No one talks like that. Still it was perfect.

Jordan made two attempts to kiss her – they were too sudden, he did not work up to it. She had to push him away both times. And yet a few minutes later when the moment was right, he did nothing. She left upset at him.

Man, a page straight out of my marriage. It made me see that this sort of thing happens not so much because I am a bonehead but that it goes much deeper than that, that it is part of the universal mystery of boy meets girl.

The high school in the show is University High School in Los Angeles, where Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor went. Since it is so close to Hollywood, you see it in other films and television shows. The show is partly based on what Holzman found at nearby Fairfax High, where she had taught writing for a time.

All the actors are the age they play. Because of child labour laws, the show had four acts (not three), with Angela appearing in only two. They filled out the stories by using more characters and their parents.

See also:

• If you like “My So-Called Life”, you might also like the plays of Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, William Inge and John van Druten
• My So-Called Life – this is the Wikipedia article. It is surprisingly good.
• Winnie Holzman
• television
• America
• film
• ninth grade