Your next box set: My So-Called Life (original) (raw)

My So-Called Life is the show that got away. It lasted just one season - 19 episodes - and while one would like to say it changed TV for ever, it didn't. If anything, its influence might be more evident in music: its unashamed teen self-regard, the wallowing in the intensity of one's feelings, seems to foreshadow the rise of emo.

The show was the brainchild of the producers of thirtysomething, and at heart it was that show transposed to high school. The characters were, in the main, stock: 15-year-old Angela Chase (Claire Danes), the bookish, sensitive narrator; her friends Rayanne (kooky, irresponsible, troubled) and Rickie (gay and Hispanic - tick those diversity boxes!); Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto), the dyslexic and almost silent rocker guy with whom Angela is in love; and Brian, the geeky boy next door who is in love with Angela.

So what makes it worth watching? Claire Danes was 15 when it was made, and she's revelatory, capturing the excruciating self-consciousness of the mid-teenage years. She's gawky and awkward one minute, graceful and funny the next. Maybe she was barely acting, because aside from Romeo + Juliet a couple of years later, she's never come close to this since. MSCL displayed a wonderfully deft touch. It dealt with "ishoos" - sexuality, identity, generational conflict - without preaching. Angela's relationship with her parents is utterly realistic, so truthful that different generations will draw differing conclusions from the same scenes. When I first saw the show, on Channel 4 in 1995, I could always see Angela's point of view. A decade later, I wished she'd listen to her mum and dad.

It wasn't perfect. One sometimes wanted to shake the characters and yell at them to snap out of their self-satisfaction: Wake up! But real lives in prosperous societies are like that: those who liked MSCL did so because it reflected truths in their own lives, and it can't be blamed for our smugness and solipsism.