Retrospective: My So-Called Life

A high school TV drama from the 90’s that got cancelled after one season. Doesn’t sound like something you’d want to watch, right?! Yet after watching one key scene from the show My So-Called Life, I knew I had to see those 19 episodes. I’ve seen many a high school drama in my day, yet this one stands out. Not only is it a brilliant time-capsule for the grungy, Cranberries-listening, angsty 90’s, but it’s also got some surprising depths beneath it’s after-school special surface.

Angela, our plaid-clad heroine, spends a lot of time mooning over the local pretty-boy Jordan Catalano, but along the way, she offers some truly insightful tidbits about a teenager’s inner turmoil. She explains away her timidity in making actual contact with her long-time love: “if you make it real, it, it's not the same. It's not...it's not yours anymore. I don't know -- maybe I'd rather have the fantasy, than even him.” I believe most teenage girls would beg to differ. Yet there is profoundness in the idea that our inner lives have the possibility to be more fulfilling than reality.

It follows that for most of the season, not much actually happens to the characters. This is perhaps where the problem with ratings might have come in. There were no real cliffhangers in the first half of the season, yet if you understood Angela’s musings, and those scenes with unsaid words hanging electrically in the air, you would be hooked. I would venture as far as to say that the second half of the season, when, no doubt, the writers were under pressure to keep their show on the air, was much less interesting. There were ghosts and drug-problems, and Jordan Catalano finally spoke more than two words. Yet the show lost something by gaining a bit more momentum. It’s charm lay in the fact that it portrayed a somewhat normal teenage life, where not everything had to be a lesson learned, and high school students often wore the same clothes several times.

The show is also underscored by a truly wonderful 90’s flashback soundtrack with the likes of The Cranberries, Buffalo Tom and R.E.M.. The following video exemplifies how the creators were able to set a perfect scene with the right song and a few meaningful looks.

Though the life-span of My So-Called Life was cut short, if there is one thought to take away from the show it is one that Angela articulates in a characteristically cartoonish teenage slang: “People always say how you should be yourself. Like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something. Like you know what it is, even. But every so often, I'll have, like, a moment when just being myself, and my life, like, right where I am, is, like, enough.”