“This life has been a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do.”
Watching My So-Called Life ups my usage of like exponentially. It also ignites my inner narrator. I could tell this story, like, a hundred more times.
“Sometimes someone says something really small and it just fits into this empty place in your heart.”
In the late summer of 1994, I prepared for my final year in elementary school, the sixth grade, something I imbued with a great deal of meaning at the time. It had only been a mere few months since my mother agreed to a subscription to Teen when I flipped through the latest issue. And there was where I found an advertisement for a show starting at the end of August on ABC. The full-page ad shows a mother and a daughter, the mother smiling and the daughter looking somewhat bemused. Black text above their heads reads, “I can’t bring myself to eat a well balanced-meal in front of my mother. It means too much to her.” I taped the ad to my wall.
“It’s such a lie that you should do what’s in your heart. If we all did what was in our hearts, the world would grind to a halt.”
My So-Called Life premiered August 25, 1994, starring Claire Danes as fifteen-year-old Angela Chase. As the show starts, Angela’s begun to hang out with bad-girl Rayanne Graff (A. J. Langer) and make-up-wearing, sexuality-questioning Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), leaving behind her childhood best friend, Sharon Cherski (Devon Odessa). Angela lives in a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh, middle-class; her parents, Patty (Bess Armstrong) and Graham (Tim Irwin), are still married, which baffles and incites jealousy from friends like Rayanne and Rickie. She also has a younger sister, Danielle (Lisa Wilhoit). Nerdy, poufy-haired Brian Krakow (Devon Gummersall) lives next door. High school is brutally, wonderfully difficult. The show’s colors and plots look and feel like they’ve been scraped with sandpaper.
“My dad and I used to be pretty tight. The sad truth is my breasts have come between us.”
It didn’t take long before my father came into my room and sat down on the bed. “Your mother thinks that’s about her,” he said, which summed up just about everything we’d been going through in the past year. “It’s just funny,” I said, which was mostly true.
“Sometimes it seems like we’re all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It’s good to get really dressed up once in a while, and admit the truth – that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they’re actually…beautiful. Possibly even me.”
Angela navigates her world for us via voice-over monologues. If the show appeared a decade later, she would probably be a blogger, narrating her writing a la Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. But My So-Called Life is delightfully stuck in a cultural moment just before everything changed – no Internet, no cell phones, plaid flannel shirts, grunge music. Though there were shows about teenagers (Beverly Hills, 90210; Degrassi; Saved by the Bell), they, along with My So-Called Life, all existed before marketers realized that teenagers of Gen X and the start of the Millennial Generation had a tremendous amount of buying power. These shows try to sell us nothing more than experiences. And My So-Called Life came the closest to offering experiences that were achingly real.
“Sometimes I think if my mother wasn’t so good at pretending to be happy she might be better at actually being happy.”
But, also mostly, I wasn’t sure what was happening anymore, why I got so angry or tearful without warning. Why I didn’t feel like doing my school work, even though I had always had good grades. Why my friends spent the summer having crushes on boys, but I didn’t. Why the parents whom I adored suddenly turned into these people who embarrassed me at mere sight. Earlier, in the fifth grade, I wrote in my diary that my mother was a bitch. Then I imaginatively hid the diary under my mattress. I came home the next day from school to find the diary on top of my floral Laura Ashley bedspread with all its pages ripped out. She told me not to write things down because then people could find them and hold them against you, but, even then, I knew that writing was my only way out.
“People are always saying you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster. Like you know what it is even. But every so often I’ll have, like, a moment, where just being myself in my life right where I am is, like, enough.”
With the exception of the epiphanical Christmas episode, the other eighteen episodes of My So-Called Life don’t offer easy answers. Patty and Graham, Angela’s teachers at school, all adults are present, but just as flawed as the teenagers they are trying to guide. Plots aren’t tucked neatly at the end of an hour-long episode; most of them string along continuously through the series, rising or falling beneath the surface depending on the episode. Angela desires nothing more than to win the affections of Jordan Catalano, an illiterate stoner who’s really good at leaning. Brian loves Angela from afar, even though their relationship has boiled down to her using him for favors. Rayanne has a drinking problem and an inattentive mother. Sharon’s dad has a heart attack, and, even though she has a boyfriend, she misses having Angela to turn to. The new English teacher tries to be there for Rickie as he struggles with his sexuality and the family that doesn’t want him anymore. Patty and Graham are often unsure of where boundaries are – for themselves, for their daughters, for how often they should let in Angela’s lost and broken friends.
“I have to say, when my father warms something up, it tastes better than when anyone else does.”
At eleven, I was almost entirely unaware of what being a teenager would bring. Though I attentively watched the high-school-age lifeguards at the pool with their car keys and tampons, bikinis and boyfriends, I never found a complete picture. I couldn’t know what they did when they scampered off with their friends. Sitcoms like Saved by the Bell showed this glossy, pretty version of life, not unlike most television shows for any age group. But becoming a teenager felt like the first time I would need help figuring out the next step, that my parents weren’t going to do it for me. So I subscribed to Teen and other similar magazines, conferred with my friends about bodily changes, and practically took notes while watching My So-Called Life. For all those breaking-away moments, however, there were probably an equal number where I just wanted to throw a baseball in the yard with my dad or have my mother spritz her perfume on the back of my neck.
“The worst feeling is suddenly realizing that you don’t measure up, and that, in the past, when you thought you did, you were a fool.”
More than any other show about teenagers, My So-Called Life focused as much on the little things as on the big. Though there are the greatly dramatic moments of Rayanne blacking out or Rickie getting beat up, there are gently dramatic moments of Angela and Jordan Catalano brushing arms in the hallway or an awkward statement lingering in the air. Sometimes, the decision to quit yearbook is as big as the decision to lose your virginity. The only place now to find this balance – aside from watching the nineteen episodes of My So-Called Life on repeat – are in the new wave of well-written young adult novels. Writers such as Sara Zarr and John Green take to the page all those swirling feelings that sometimes seem to only exist in your head, in your memories.
“We both stopped talking. Part of his sleeve was touching my arm. I don’t know if he knew. Then everything started to seem perfect for some reason. The feel of his shirt against my elbow, the fact that I still had an elbow. It was the perfect moment for him to kiss me, for him to anything me.”
Sometimes, as an adult, it’s hard to watch My So-Called Life. There’s a scene early in the first episode where Angela and Sharon confront each other in the grungy school bathroom. Sharon is trying to warn Angela about Rayanne’s short attention span with new friends, while at the same time trying not to show her jealousy. Sharon’s voice starts to break as she says, “So, um, so tell me what I did, Angela. I mean, I mean, I would really like to know.” Angela’s chin quivers and her voice shakes as she tries to respond. “Nothing. It’s not something that you…” Sharon cuts her off. “So you just drop your oldest friend for no reason? I mean, just tell me what I did.” Angela, however, doesn’t have a real answer. “I can’t. It’s not like one thing, it’s not like that.” Those moments. Those moments were so awful when your friendships dissolve and it hurts like a romantic break-up, the feelings are so intense. Sometimes watching My So-Called Life serves as the greatest reminder that I’m beyond grateful we go through puberty only once and that my one time is long, long gone.
“There are so many different ways to be connected to people. There are the people you feel this unspoken connection to, even though there’s not even a word for it. There’s the people who you’ve known forever who know you in this way that other people can’t because they’ve seen you change. They’ve let you change.”
And then the series just ends. Rickie finally says that he’s gay. Rayanne knows that she needs to be a better friend. Sharon and Angela are friends again, even though they both know it won’t be like before. Graham is inches away from kissing someone who isn’t Patty. Patty realizes that she needs to be easier on people, especially herself. Jordan Catalano makes amends with Angela via love letters. Angela finds out that the letters were written by Brian. Brian tells Angela, in not so many words, that he believes for himself everything he wrote on Jordan Catalano’s behalf. Angela gets in Jordan Catalano’s car, leaving Brian sitting on his bike on the sidewalk, staring off into a future we’ll never get to see. As Rayanne often said, “We had a time.”
“What’s amazing is when you can feel your life going somewhere. Like your life just figured out how to get good. Like that second.”
