How ‘My So-Called Life’ Paved The Way For The Golden Age Of Prestige Drama

Twenty years ago, My So-Called Life introduced the world to the Claire Danes cry face. In a show about the terminal ennui of adolescence, Danes brought a weepy intensity to the character of Angela Chase, a teenager who pondered the meaning of life while listening to The Cranberries, and who was a little too obsessed with Anne Frank. She was also thirteen at the time of the pilot, so you better believe that the angst was REAL.

It was awesome.

My So-Called Life was a critical success, but like all things made for or about teenagers, it will never really be considered high quality television. And yet not only did it influence the depiction of white teeth teens that would take over our screens for decades to come, but in many ways it also changed the parameters of what you could do on television. (This makes sense, of course: the arbitrators of Must.Watch.TV in 2014 would have been absorbing MSCL while eating bowls of microwave rice in their college dorm rooms, or during their first shitty writing job as a story editor on a local soap.)

It’s easy to dismiss My So-Called Life, because the last fifteen years have ingrained in us a specific definition of what important TV is meant to be: serious, (usually) white males working out serious, possibly illegal or world-changing issues — and if you don’t like it, your tastes must not be sophisticated enough to appreciate it. Enjoy your Big Bang Theory, schmuck!

Critics may claim that we’ve entered a new age of sophistication, but the signifiers of the Golden Age of TV existed long before Heisenberg came knocking.

 This flowchart exists, your argument is irrelevant. 

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My So-Called Life And Sex In The City: Are You A Carrie, Or A Rayanne? 

Long before Carrie Bradshaw starred vacantly out the window and pondered for the 8905650 millionth time, “I couldn’t help but wonder…”, Angela Chase was the queen of dramatic inner monologues. While viewers gave Sex and the City shit for its cheesy one-liners about love and friendship that never really resembled the thoughts of a real person, My So-Called Life was almost too honest.

Angela’s stream of teen consciousness was cringingly earnest: “What I like, dread, is when people who know you in completely different ways end up in the same area … And you have to develop this like, combination you, on the spot,” she muses, while exchanging meaningful glances in the school corridor. It’s like reading your high school diary, in the worst/best way possible.

Sex and the City forged a space for active, female sexuality on television, but My So-Called Life set the groundwork for its core: female friendship. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha debriefed the minutia of their sex lives, to the point where it didn’t seem to happen if the gang hadn’t weighed in on it at brunch. My So-Called Life was just as frank when it came to sex talk. Even Sharon, Angela’s conservative ‘good girl’ best friend, happily explains that sex with her boyfriend is only good once they’ve broken up; she also defends her enemy, rebel girl Rayanne Graff, when others slut shame her, “There’s a lot of great reasons to hate her, without dragging in her sex life”. The MSCL girls were free to have and discuss sex without the show passing judgment on them, which was pretty rare for the time. Just like Sex and the City, sex could get in the way of their friendships — and that was the greatest tragedy.

Angela never bones Jordon Catalano, but boy, does she think about it every time their arms brush: “In my heart I would’ve done anything, I wanted him so much,” she says at one point. Yet like Carrie, she gets tired of acting like the mysterious Cool Girl just to keep him.

Carrie eventually relents and goes back to the withholding and emotionally unavailable Mr. Big, but Angela chooses independence and ‘Blister In The Sun’ – and Carrie is supposed to be a feminist icon?

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My So-Called Life And The Wire: The World’s Ills Aren’t Solved At The Hour’s End

In the early ‘90s, network TV shows loved having ‘issue’ episodes. They were nearly always awful.

My So-Called Life wasn’t much different, but instead of having Brandon save the day when Matthew Perry starts waving a gun around, MSCL rarely indicated that these issues — ranging from absent parents and economic instability to addiction and the limitations of the American education system — could be solved. For a one-season show about teenage romance, it sure spent a lot of time pondering the ways in which institutions can fail individuals.

Exploring the failure of systems has been the theme of pretty much every critically acclaimed drama for the past twenty years, but particularly The Wire. While the link between Angela Chase and Omar Little may be tenuous, David Simon’s explanation of The Wire makes it seem like his show is a natural evolution from the trials and tribulations of The Chases: “We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show… it is not designed purely as an entertainment. It is, I’m afraid, a somewhat angry show”.

When Rickie is beaten and kicked out of his uncle’s house because he is gay, there’s never a rosy reconciliation between them. Angela is even mocked for claiming that she has the answers to his displacement: “What, you go to one abandoned warehouse, you’re like the expert on homeless people?” Meanwhile, Rayanne and Jordan are both obviously from unstable, sometimes abusive households: the first thing Jordan says when he walks into Angela’s house is “Wow, food!”.

Then there’s Jordan Catalano, who goes through school without any of his teachers bothering to realise he has a learning disability; the only teacher who does — an “Oh Captain! My Captain!”-type figure — turns out to be on the run from his child support payments.

Authority figures are almost constantly failing Angela and her friends, not dis-similarly to Dukie and his in season four of The Wire. Early on in the series, My So-Called Life has its ‘gun episode’, when police are called-in to investigate who brought a firearm to school. The parents are frantic but the children aren’t fazed. “Everyone knows there’s like fifty guns at school at any given moment,” Rayanne says, bored. At the end of the episode, Angela, Rayanne and Rickie arrive at school only to find metal detectors and police officers at the entrance. They walk through silently and the screen fades to black.

Not all social commentary takes a whole season to express.

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My So-Called Life And Six Feet Under: We’re All Going To Die

You know how in teen dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The O.C and Dawson’s Creek, the kids were real quip-y, and faced their problems with a snappy one liner? My So-Called Life was not that way inclined. When you look at the melancholy that plagued every character, compared to its timeslot competitors Friends and Mad About You, it’s unsurprising that the show only lasted one season. What would you rather watch after a long day of work? A bunch of attractive people yelling “WE WERE ON A BREAK!” to a laugh track, or Rayanne Graff having a drug overdose and Angela Chase crying?

My god, the crying!

Show creator Winnie Holzman wasn’t afraid of dark humour, which was fairly unusual for a youth-skewed program. In the pilot episode, Angela refuses to eat her dinner while staring at her mum and thinking, “I can’t even look at my mother without wanting to stab her repeatedly”. Death is invoked constantly; Angela describes wanting to hang out with Rayanne so much that it felt like she “would die… or something”; even sensible Brian Krakow announces that he doesn’t care about his unrequited love for Angela, because, “She’s still going to die someday. We’re all going to die!”

It goes beyond teenage melodrama; it’s exactly the kind of bleak humour that later made Six Feet Under so unusual.

Six Feet Under revolved around morbidity, and was relentless in depicting the most depressing version of events. In the same way, My So-Called Life constantly picked the worst case scenario, with the most glaring example the breakdown of Angela and Rayanne’s friendship after Rayanne sleeps with Jordan. Despite it being the great love affair of the show, the closest they come to a resolution is rehearsing a play where Angela tearfully asks Rayanne if the betrayal made her happy; Rayanne tearfully replies, “No”.

Just like the Fischers have to constantly negotiate their relationships with each other, the Chases never really figure out how to be a family: “Sometimes I think if my mother wasn’t so good at pretending to be happy, she’d be better at being happy,” Angela reckons at one point.

And the one overwhelming positive that came from Six Feet Under — the depiction of a three-dimensional homosexual character — was done by My So-Called Life almost ten years earlier, with Rickie: the first openly gay teenager on TV. Neither show shrugged away from showing the struggle behind the stereotypes.

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My So-Called Life And The Sopranos: The Rise Of The Anti-Hero

Was Angela Chase TV’s first anti-hero? Those of you who are precious about television probably would have left this at The Wire comparison, but to those who are still reading: stay with me here.

In the scheme of teen TV, the only thing that My So-Called Life has in common with 90210 or Gossip Girl is that they take place in a school. My So-Called Life didn’t force its characters to redeem themselves. Angela was a character who was not awkward in a cute way; she was strange, selfish and self-absorbed. She was ‘likable’ (if we still have to use that ridiculous concept), but she wasn’t always sympathetic. You didn’t always want to her to win.

Tony Soprano, Walter White… Angela Chase?

According to legend, Tony Soprano was one of the first characters on a successful television show that inverted the idea of a TV hero. He did bad things, was an unfaithful husband and an absent father and yet, when he was betrayed by his ‘family’, we were on his side. He was allowed to be a hypocritical character, and was given room to develop his identity. He wasn’t good or bad, just Tony.

In that same vein, Angela Chase was also a rare complicated character. Unlike Brenda and Kelly, she was full of great hatred and vindictiveness (“Hatred can become like food,” she thinks. “It can become energy, you can live off it.” What the fuck?). But she was also generous and introspective and constantly trying to figure out what type of person she actually was. It has only recently become commonplace to see morally ambiguous characters on TV — maybe My So-Called Life created the wiggle room.

And if Angela Chase had had a therapist, who knows? The show may have gone for two more seasons, at least.

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Sinead Stubbins is a writer from Melbourne who has done stuff for Yen, frankie, Smith Journal and Elle. She tweets at @sineadstubbins