Television This article is more than 6 years oldRiot grrrls, beta males and fluid fashion: how My So-Called Life changed TV forever
This article is more than 6 years oldThe show lasted only one series, but it rewrote television’s rules, breaking down conventions and giving teens an authentic voice
“We all felt that it was time for a teenage girl to be front and centre.” It’s weird to hear that now, but it was even weirder to hear it then. My So-Called Life creator Winnie Holzman was one of the few who felt this way in the early 90s. At the time, teen girls who were taught to be seen and not heard had started loudly rocking out to the feminist antics of the riot grrrls, but mainstream culture wasn’t playing along. The likes of Beverly Hills 90210’s Brenda Walsh and Saved by the Bell’s Kelly Kapowski were all they had for role models, conventional beauties stuck within an equally sparkling entourage. At that point, on television, there was no one like My So-Called Life’s heroine Angela Chase.
Appearing for one season on ABC in the US and on Channel 4 in the UK from 1994 to 1995, My So-Called Life revolved around a 15-year-old girl searching for her identity. Like The Wonder Years before it, MSCL was that rare series to use a teenager as its narrator, but, unlike Kevin Arnold, Angela Chase was a highly unreliable one. “People say you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing,” she’d say. With her, the personal was political; Angela’s revolution was within herself, a rebellion against her former identity – the one prescribed by her parents. Despite her attempt at maturity, however, her solipsistic view of the world laid bare her white suburban privilege and her often contradictory views within that.
“Trying to do a television show from inside of a person’s experience was a pretty new thing,” recalls co-producer Marshall Herskovitz. “Television was externalised in a very particular way, and having the subjective point of view of this girl that was not afraid to show her pain, to show her terror, that sort of thing was very new on television – and, I think, in certain ways ahead of its time.”
The seeds of MSCL date back to the 80s when Showtime assigned Herskovitz to write a series about teenagers; he conceived a “very personal, very internal” story about a boy and called it Secret/Seventeen. “It was my interpretation of my own experience of being that age and what it was like to go through all the tectonic changes that your mind and your body go through at that time,” he recalls.
But management changed, and his series was not picked up in the end. So Herskovitz and co-producer Ed Zwick moved on to thirtysomething, a dramedy about the angst of a bunch of delayed adolescents in their 30s. There they approached writer Winnie Holzman about creating their next series, and when Herskovitz mentioned Secret/Seventeen, she “really sparked to it”, as she had been ruminating about her own adolescence.
She started with a diary. Holzman wrote from her own memories of high school – Herskovitz says she could conjure them better than anyone he had ever met – formulating what would eventually become the voice of MSCL’s narrator. “Everything that you love about that show was already there, just in those words that she wrote from this girl’s point of view,” says Herskovitz, who adds, “It’s not like she was doing herself; what she was doing was [projecting] the sensibility that I think every sensitive introspective person has when they go through adolescence.” Both he and Zwick read her notes and immediately responded, “OK, go. You’ve got a show.’”
With Claire Danes, Holzman was able to mould these words into the shape of Angela Chase. The as-yet-unknown actor was chosen over Alicia Silverstone, as the latter’s Hollywood beauty would have subverted the series’ aim – to authenticate the teen girl experience. Danes was beautiful one minute, plain the next; her body language expressing what words failed to, her own life informing that of her fictional alter ego. As Brian Krakow (Devon Gummersall), the geek who is crushing on Angela says, “She’s not just a fantasy. She’s got, like, flaws. She’s real.”
Highly attuned to small-screen stereotypes, Holzman was intent on dismantling them. She gave Angela parents (Patty, the breadwinner, Graham, the homebody) who were still themselves in the midst of establishing their identities and discovering their incompatibility with traditional domestic tropes. MSCL was the rare drama that focused on the mundane minutiae of family life (which meant it also appealed to an adult demographic), this sphere often being relegated to the comedy genre. The choice was, in fact, made out of necessity, since, as a minor, Danes’ hours on set were limited. But the parents were ultimately essential to MSCL’s impact, because they not only represented our lifelong struggle with identity, they represented where Angela was coming from in the story of where she was going.
“Most stories begin with an old order crumbling because some unexpected force has exerted itself,” Holzman says, via email, “That, for me, was Rayanne.” Angela’s newly acquired friendships with Rayanne Graff (AJ Langer) and Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) embodied her future, while her ex-best friend Sharon Cherski (Devon Odessa) personified her past. “I knew I wanted Rayanne to be wild and to lead Angela into challenging new situations,” Holzman says. The epitome of excess, Rayanne was a physical onslaught – all those braids, all those layers, all that volume – whose single-parent household and descent into drug-induced near-death was a means for the Chases to betray their suburban condescension and for Holzman to betray her commentary on privileged folk’s response to socioeconomic divides and the complexities of hierarchical friendships.
Then there was Rickie, an effeminate teen – ABC found his application of eyeliner more unsettling than anything else – of indeterminate race who crushed on boys and at one point found himself homeless. “I belong nowhere, with no one. I don’t fit,” he says in one episode, which is how Holzman conceived him. “I wanted Rickie to be – well, ultimately he identifies as gay, but initially I wanted him to be sexually androgynous – not so easily categorised,” she explains.
The character was inspired by Holzman’s teen peers, but also Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which explored the marginalised – by race, class, sexuality and gender – worlds of New York drag balls. MSCL was the first primetime show to feature not only a recurring gay teen but one who also happened to be a person of colour.
And with actor Wilson Cruz coming out in tandem with his character, US LGBT magazine The Advocate dubbed him a “poster boy for gay youth”. The irony being, however, that Rickie was not meant to be a symbol but simply a part of Angela’s life, though he turned out to be the part that caused the Chases to face their ambivalence about homosexuality and multiculturalism, not to mention their views on masculinity.
MSCL not only flirted with gender fluidity before it became a part of the national conversation, it questioned the parameters of conventional maleness. Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto), the show’s supposed alpha, was dyslexic with a rocky home life and a certain fragility about him (he didn’t stand, he leaned, and he was forever using eye drops as though not even his eyes were able to exist in the world without leaning on something). He was socially privileged at school, but was very much the object of Angela’s gaze, not to mention a step below her in the class hierarchy outside of the classroom.
Brian Krakow, meanwhile, may have pined after Angela but he was not without virility, particularly when he was sharing a microscope with a girl he liked. It would be a few years before a guy like this would get the girl in the guise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Xander, Dawson’s Creek’s Dawson and Felicity’s Noel, Angela preferring, in this case, to choose fantasy over reality. “Brian is part of her past, so someone she must reject if she’s going to move into this new experimental identity,” says Holzman. “They know each other in a particular way – intimately, in some ways – and yet, because they are both now struggling with her transformation, neither really knows how to relate to each other any more.”
Whether or not its heroine was getting any, My So-Called Life was the rare primetime show that candidly discussed teen sex (according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, by 1996 only 12% of shows involved adolescent sexual content) – not only that, teen girl sex. In Angela’s words, “There’s this dividing line between girls who have had sex, and girls who haven’t.” Thus Sharon, the suburban good girl, self-flagellates for enjoying sex with a guy she doesn’t respect, while Rayanne, the deadbeat, is free to believe “you don’t have to, like, be in love to have a good time”, while ultimately feeling empty. And Angela, unable to conceive of copulation without all the losses associated with it, fails to bend to Jordan’s pressure. As she says early on in the series, “I don’t know, maybe I’d rather have the fantasy than even him.” Even for Angela, sex is too actual.
While authentic adolescence could be heard in the words and seen on the bodies of MSCL’s characters, the show’s accoutrements spoke to their reality just as readily. Beverly Hills 90210 had transformed the teen show into a vehicle for marketing fashion and music, but the look and sound of My So-Called Life interacted with the lives within it. Costume designer Patrick R Norris gave each actor a closet, to preserve the realism of repetition, and ensured that Angela’s clothes did not overpower her internal dialogue, though her progress towards bolder plaid did express her increasing emancipation. The seamlessness of her friendships was depicted in the fluidity of the characters’ wardrobes, with Angela later on in the series, for instance, sporting the kind of shearling jacket favoured by Jordan.
Various characters – Brian and Rickie, Angela and Rayanne, Angela’s younger sister – even switched looks in order to explore each other’s identities. Similarly, alternative bands such as Buffalo Tom performed the characters’ angst, while a story arc created for singer-songwriter and actor Juliana Hatfield gave a clear nod to the riot grrrls’ power of turning the young female experience into art.
MSCL’s clothes and music were so inextricable from its characters that fans used both to express their connection to the show. They wore Doc Martens and listened to the Lemonheads as they read Claire Danes interviews in Sassy magazine and deconstructed the show’s feminism in Bitch. Despite this vibrant following, however, on 15 May 1995, months after the last episode aired, ABC cancelled the series due to its “far too narrow” appeal. In response, MSCL fans established the first online campaign to save a show. The self-appointed “Lifers” took over ABC boards and, though they failed to save their series, it did land another run on MTV.
“Networks didn’t understand that you could sell to adolescent girls,” Herskovitz said years later. There was no precedent, he adds now, though he remembers everything changing around the time Claire Danes started working on the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. “All of a sudden, it was like, just boom,” he says. “The culture had suddenly discovered teen girls.”
The year MSCL was cancelled, The WB became home to a panoply of series that owed their lives to Angela’s, including Felicity, The Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill and Buffy. The show’s influence even reached outside the network to Fox’s The OC, MTV’s Daria and NBC’s Freaks and Geeks. But there remains something unique to MSCL, and even its creators are not immune. Herskovitz says that recently he, Holzman and director Scott Winant were watching the pilot together on the advent of a new DVD release and by the end of it, all three of them were sobbing. “To look back at this thing that was so pure,” Herskovitz says, “that anyone let us do it, that’s why we were crying.”
In My Humble Opinion: My So-Called Life by Soraya Roberts is published by ECW Press
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