![]() #My so called life seriesHow do you process the show if you’re accustomed to dramas more aware of their genre conventions? How do you process the show if you’re accustomed to series with fewer restrictions on content and topicality? Can you avoid the ahistorical condescension of calling MSCL “quaint” or “dated” when it was ahead of its time in so many ways? Rewatching these 19 episodes was a freaking roller-coaster! Rewatching now, My So-Called Life remains easy to embrace, equally easy to mock and totally fascinating in its placement right on the cusp of TV’s latest golden age. Within a couple of years, The WB’s teen template was established and shows like Buffy and Felicity and Dawson’s Creek were able to combine earnestness and knowing awareness of John Hughes in a way that spoke to my reference-craving Gen-Y brain. I also preferred Beverly Hills, 90210, even though I knew it was garbage. As ultra-earnest evocations of youth went, I preferred The Wonder Years, with its killer ’60s soundtrack and first-crush Winnie Cooper. I’ve subsequently watched the pilot a couple of times, but this was the first time I’ve watched the rest of the series in 25 years.įor me, My So-Called Life has always been a show I appreciated, but nestled beneath other shows I liked more. But more than that, I was only a hair older than the characters, and it was a show people seemed to be talking about and relating to at my high school (and probably every high school). I cared what critics said, and it was the most acclaimed show of that season. The writing, and especially the jokes, are frequently great (e.g., the immortal line when Angela’s dad asks, sincerely, “Who’s scarier than Madonna?” in the Halloween episode), but the writers also know when to put themselves in the backseat to the looking and being looked at that are so much the currency of high school.Ĭritic's Notebook: 'RuPaul's Drag Race' Demands the Impossible - and Therein Lies Its Greatnessĭaniel Fienberg: I definitely watched My So-Called Life when it premiered in the fall of 1994. So I greatly appreciated that My So-Called Life felt like a channeling of adolescence rather than Holzman’s version of, say, The Breakfast Club.Īngela (Danes) is both profound and inarticulate, transparent and incoherent. Most teen stories onscreen (your Riverdales, your Buffy the Vampire Slayers, your American Pies) seem to be more about reaching milestones in fantastical fashion than actual teenage experiences (one wonderful recent exception: Eighth Grade). Having watched it for the first time this past weekend, over a quarter-century after its debut, I can say that it’s a show I admire more than one I connect with. #My so called life tvInkoo Kang: Until this weekend, my so-called TV expertise failed to include My So-Called Life, a show that I was too young for during its original run and that for some reason I’d never been interested enough in to check out. But does it hold up in the era of prestige TV? We discuss. Starring Claire Danes as 15-year-old Angela Chase, a daydreaming high-schooler in suburban Pittsburgh, and created by Winnie Holzman, the teen drama became an enduring cult classic for its insights into the mind of a teenage girl. ![]()
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