'Genuinely groundbreaking': My So-Called Life is still utterly lovable TV, 30 years on

08/20/2024 10:21 AM

This excellent 90s drama made movie stars out of Claire Danes and Jared Leto – and featured TV's first out gay actor playing an out gay character. It's a joy to revisit

Can it really have been 30 years since Angela Chase developed a life-consuming crush on Jordan Catalano just because of the way he leaned? My So-Called Life, created by Winnie Holzman, made its TV debut on 25 August 1994, and over the past three decades, it has stood firm as a cultural touchstone, in part due to making bona fide movie stars of Claire Danes and Jared Leto, who both got their break on the show. But does it still stand up as a TV drama? I went back to my DVDs – it was briefly available to stream in the UK on Disney+, but is not at the moment – and watched it for the first time in a decade. And now, I can very much believe that it's been 30 years. It looks old, but more curiously, it feels it. It is very much a show of its time, and a different time.

Yet I loved it all over again, for reasons more befitting of an adult, which is why the show was and remains so special. At the time, its portrait of a teenage girl's life and psyche was revolutionary. This was not a show about teenagers played by 35-year-olds in California; it was about 15-year-olds in a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh, most of whom were working-class, and most of whom had family lives that left them untethered and lost. Guided by Angela's voiceover, a teen-angst ramble that was always allowed to be flawed and awkward, it looked at complicated friendships, social hierarchies, parents, family, sex, drugs and wild crushes, from inside the mind of its young protagonist. I also saw Inside Out 2 this week, and though Riley is younger than Angela, the guiding principle is not dissimilar. When Angela makes yet another bad decision, you can wonder whether Anxiety or Embarrassment are at the control desk, pulling the levers.