“My So-Called Life” appeared only 13 years ago but leaves one feeling nostalgic for a time when teenagers still communicated with pauses and half-thoughts, and were not perceived solely as an amalgam of their accomplishments. Angela was a bright girl who performed unspectacularly at school (she got a 59 on a geometry test, quit yearbook and didn’t play lacrosse or join the debate team). Even so, there was never a sense that her options for a prosperous and fulfilling adulthood would be foreclosed because of her reluctance to apply herself.
Angela Chase was 100% relateable. She was awkward. Her parents were annoying. Her crush was out of her league. She wasn't rich and model-perfect. She was relateable to all awkward teenagers. She wasn't someone we all wished we were. She was someone we knew we were, and frankly, were afraid of being. Because no one wants to be the quiet girl in the back row... Or the girl with the zit or the know-it-all little sister. Unfortunately relateability is something producers seem to have skimmed over in all teen dramas since. And that's too bad.
Because typical teenagers aren't like this:
Mischa Barton in "The OC"
Leighton Meester in "Gossip Girl"
Leighton Meester in "Gossip Girl"They're like this:
Claire Danes as Angela Chase
Me as myself, awkward and brace-faced: Age 13.
Me as myself: madly in love with Jordan Catalano, Age 14Teenage girls need real role models, not super models posing as such...
As the touchstone examination of adolescence in the ’90s, “My So-Called Life” rejected the Clintonian ethos of ambition: striving, perhaps, wasn’t better. And at the same time it linked itself closely to the feminism of the period, one that prized interiority, self-help and revolutions from within. It was a diluted notion of female advancement, but at least it was a modestly dressed one. Angela wore late-grunge-era flannels and baggy shapes. So there is another way, finally, that “My So-Called Life” looks like no other teenage series that succeeded it: We never saw our heroine’s bellybutton.Gone are the days of celebrating the truth about adolescence, in all it's strange and fucked-up glory. And that just plain sucks, in my opinion.
GGC
