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In Watch This, Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff tells you what she’s watching on TV — and why you should watch it too. Read the archives here. This week: the one-season ABC drama My So-Called Life, which first aired August 25, 1994. You can watch the show’s first and only season on Hulu.
When I was 14, I wanted Angela Chase’s hair.
In the pilot of My So-Called Life — one of my favorite episodes of television ever made and quite possibly the best television pilot ever made — Angela (Claire Danes) stops hanging out with her childhood best friend to spend time with the slightly edgy, somewhat dangerous Rayanne Graff (A.J. Langer). They live in suburban Pittsburgh, and Angela is safely upper middle class, so it’s not like Rayanne is luring her into a life of crime. But she does convince Angela to dye her drab blonde hair a bright red.
As dramatic incidents intended to kick off TV shows go, this one might sound a little lackluster. “That’s it?” you might think. “She dyes her hair?” But Angela’s decision further widens an already growing split between her and her mother, who is struggling to understand that her 15-year-old is no longer a little girl.
Over the course of the episode, Angela will figure out how to navigate the twin identities of herself and her mother’s daughter, sometimes skillfully and sometimes clumsily. She’ll have been brought home by the cops and talked to the boy she has a crush on. And she’ll tell us every little thing she’s thinking via omnipresent but never overbearing voiceover narration.
My So-Called Life is a special show to those of us who were teens when it first aired in 1994 (especially those of us who maybe should have realized that our desire to possess Angela’s locks was a sign of some deeper identity questions we had yet to fully confront). But it’s a special show even now, 25 years after it debuted. If you first watched it as a teen, it plays differently but just as well as an adult.
And if you’ve never seen it before, well, now’s a great time to start.
Few teen TV shows capture the awkward fumbling of adolescence as well as this one
A fairly common complaint that critics level against shows about teenagers is that “no teenager would talk that way.” What we usually mean is that teens on TV are often hyper-literate and incredibly articulate, possessed of witty quips and the ability to deliver exactly the right response in every moment. But if you remember your teen years at all, you’ll remember that, uh, you rarely knew exactly the right thing to say.
The best of these teen shows with stylized dialogue — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, say — use their articulate teens to get at how it feels to be a smarter-than-average teenager, hanging out with your friends and feeling the way your brain seems to expand a few inches more with every passing hour. Adolescence is such a wild ride for even the best-behaved kids that hearing Buffy Summers and her pals’ heightened dialogue serves as a metaphor for that very journey.
My So-Called Life takes the opposite tack. It depicts the awkward fumbling of adolescence, but because Angela’s voiceover is present, the show never lacks for thoughtful perspectives on what’s happening. (Occasional episodes also hand over the voiceover action to her nerdy next-door neighbor and her little sister.) And the stories the show tells remain small-scale — what happens when you dye your hair and your mom flips out? That sort of thing.
My So-Called Life broke some new ground with this approach. The character of Ricky (Wilson Cruz) was the first gay series regular on a teen TV show. And the show was unique among teen TV offerings of the era for taking the travails of Angela’s parents just as seriously as it did those of Angela and her friends.
When I attended a speech given by series creator Winnie Holzman a few years ago, she said that when she was writing the pilot, series executive producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick told her that the mother character in several drafts wasn’t working because Holzman “hadn’t learned to love her yet.” That story has always stood out to me as a summation of why My So-Called Life wasn’t just a good show but a special one.
We might be looking at the world through Angela’s eyes, and we might be primarily following her story. But part of growing up is starting to realize how many other people around you have stories to tell, too, and how often those stories are just as interesting as your own. As Holzman learned to love all her characters, the journey of My So-Called Life came to be about Angela learning to love people she might grow frustrated with or irritated by. That quality was passed on to the audience — and made for a teen TV classic.
It’s the classic show canceled too soon — one season was not enough — but what a gift to have that tiny window into the lives of these people, on the precipice of some larger, less so-called, more real life.
My So-Called Life is streaming on Hulu.
