by Jeff Jensen


Looking back at ''My So-Called Life'' -- How ABC's angsty gem set the tone for
teen dramas
by Jeff Jensen

There are some TV shows that last for years and years, and when they finally
go away, they're barely missed. And then there is the phenomenon of the TV
show that dies quickly but leaves an indelible mark. Ten years ago, ABC
fielded such a show: My So-Called Life, produced by the thirtysomething team
of Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, premiered on Thursday, August 25,
1994 -- and was quickly reduced to ratings rubble by another new 8 p.m.
series, NBC's Friends. But in 19 sublime episodes, Life left a lasting
pop-culture legacy. Not only did it launch the careers of Claire Danes and
Jared Leto, it defined the modern family drama -- and has influenced an entire
generation of television writers. Says Greg Berlanti, the creator of The WB's
Everwood and Jack & Bobby, ''It's the most painfully honest portrayal of
adolescence ever on television.''

Created by writer-producer Winnie Holzman, My So-Called Life (now rerunning on
The N) tells the story of a 15-year-old high school sophomore named Angela
Chase (Danes). Having grown apart from her parents (Bess Armstrong and Tom
Irwin), her good-girl best friend Sharon Cherski (Devon Odessa), and the
brainiac boy next door with the huge crush, Brian Krakow (Devon Gummersall),
the angsty Angela finds herself bonding with troubled party girl Rayanne Graff
(A.J. Langer) and her closeted gay friend Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz). She's
also hopelessly hooked on Jordan Catalano (Leto), a soulful yet frustratingly
monosyllabic dreamboat. Holzman took these stock types and made them
complicated and real -- you didn't need to be a girl to feel Angela's longing
for Jordan, didn't need to be gay to connect with Rickie's coming-out journey.

''It had a tremendous impact on me,'' says Berlanti. ''We reference the show
at least once a week in the writers' room here. . . When I think about My
So-Called Life,'' he adds, ''I think about that line in Star Wars, when
Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader, 'If you strike me down, I shall become more
powerful than you can possibly imagine.' That's exactly what happened here.''

And so we asked the actors and creators behind My So-Called Life to recount
the show's brief but lasting existence.

I. THESE KIDS TODAY

''I mean, this whole thing with yearbook -- it's like, everybody's in this big
hurry to make this book, to supposedly remember what happened. Because if you
made a book of what really happened, it'd be a really upsetting book.'' --
Angela Chase

The origins of My So-Called Life date back to 1976, when Zwick and Herskovitz
were writer-producers on the TV series Family. ''We found ourselves often
confined to a more appropriate and decorous presentation of adolescence,''
says Zwick. ''My So-Called Life is based on some unspoken vow to reexamine
adolescence per our vision.'' In the mid-'80s, the duo went on to create
thirtysomething, where they met and employed Holzman. After ABC canceled
thirtysomething in 1991, Zwick and Herskovitz sat down with Holzman to
brainstorm a new show. Several concepts were discussed before Herskovitz
suggested revisiting the subject of adolescence. Their shared ambition, says
Holzman, was an ''uncensored'' depiction of teenage life.

Looking back at ''My So-Called Life''

HERSKOVITZ: I was very insistent: ''Winnie, teenagers are different now than
they were when we were young. You have to do research.''

HOLZMAN: The Writers Guild of America has this program where you can do
volunteer teaching. I did it for a day or two. Hardest thing I ever did in my
life.

HERSKOVITZ: She came back and said, ''You're completely wrong. Teenagers are
exactly the same.''

ZWICK: Winnie wrote in a notebook just pages and pages in the voice of this
character. She just captured how everything in adolescence is so very vivid
and turbocharged with meaning.

HOLZMAN: The question I always got that year was, Is your daughter a teenager?
At that time, she was 8. I just went back to what it was like to be a teenager
for me. Sure, Angela's me. But at the risk of sounding. . . whatever, all the
characters were me. I was really just making stuff up.

The reaction to the pilot script at ABC was immediate: ''Brilliant,'' says Ted
Harbert, then the network's president of entertainment. ''There was no
question we would make the pilot.'' Now they needed an Angela. During a
casting session in New York in early 1993, a 13-year-old New Yorker with
little professional acting experience was brought before Zwick, Herskovitz,
and Holzman. She was the second girl they saw that day.

HOLZMAN: The first was Alicia Silverstone. A lovely actress, but so
perfect-looking. She was not what I had written.

HERSKOVITZ: We needed somebody who shimmered between beauty and sort of not
formed yet. And in walks Claire. She read the scene in the pilot where she has
a confrontation with her childhood best friend. There was a direction that
said, ''Angela starts to tear up.'' Claire gets to the moment. Her whole face
turns red. She's having this intense emotional experience -- and then pulls it
back. Everybody was just knocked out.

DANES: I identified immediately with Angela. They seemed to really understand
what it was like to be a sophomore in high school. This is some of the best
material I've ever had to work with in my entire career.

ZWICK: I remember taking Claire's parents to dinner. We felt obliged to tell
them what life was going to be like for the next year or two -- or maybe the
rest of her life.

DANES: My parents and I were just taking a leap of faith. Ed and Marshall were
trying to prepare me, but there's no way to do that. And my life did take a
drastic turn.

II. ADOLESCENTS, INTERRUPTED

''Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison. And the
crime is how much we hate ourselves.'' -- Angela

The pilot was shot in the spring of 1993, but ABC did not pick up the show for
the fall, and instead optioned it as a midseason replacement for early 1994.

LANGER: I'll never forget the first screening of the pilot. I had never been
so satisfied or inspired. After that, we were all hooked. We just wanted to do
this show.

DANES: I went back to high school, and halfway through my freshman year, it
got picked up. It was pretty traumatic to leave school like that. Also, I had
already suffered the disappointment of, you know, ''not having the show
continue.'' Much of my, like, enthusiasm for it had waned. I had to recommit
to it.

GUMMERSALL: By the time we started shooting again, I had grown five inches.
You can totally tell.

When the order for more shows came in October of 1993, 19-year-old Wilson Cruz
had been cast as 15-year-old Rickie. He was described in the script, says
Cruz, as ''half black, half Puerto Rican, sexually ambiguous like Jodie Foster
in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.'' Translation: gay, but still coming to
terms with it -- not unlike Cruz himself.

CRUZ: I had decided if it was picked up, I wanted to be out publicly. I needed
those other 15-year-old boys like Rickie to watch the show and believe him. I
came out to my mom first. She was emotional, but fine with it. On Christmas
Eve of '93, I came out to my dad. He kicked me out. I lived in my car from
that Christmas Eve through March of '94, when we started filming the series.

When production finally began, the cast learned that a guest star from the
pilot had been brought back as a regular: 22-year-old newcomer Jared Leto.

HOLZMAN: We actually didn't know if Jordan Catalano was going to continue
beyond the pilot. Once we got a load of Jared on camera with Claire, his
presence -- it was so magnetic. By the time we were done with the pilot, we
knew the stories would always include him.

DANES: I remember there was one scene with Jared where the direction was to
kiss him all over his face. I didn't know what that meant because I hadn't
really made out many times before. I was kind of slobbering all over him. He
guided me through it and educated me on how to, like, make out. There were so
many overlaps with our real adolescence. I was 13 when I did the pilot. I was
having a rough time making sense of my development, my burgeoning sexual self,
all of those unruly feelings that accompany that time. I was just so glad that
I had a forum to kind of exercise these feelings. I mean, I had Jared Leto
teaching me how to make out.

GUMMERSALL: You would get a script and you'd think, God, this is so weird, I
just went through this. Yeah, I was smitten with Claire. She knew it. But
there was no, like, problems or anything. It was cool. We were just real good
friends.

CRUZ: Winnie and I had a talk about what happened to me [with my father]and
perhaps using it in the show. When that episode aired on December 22, my
father watched it and called me home. So I have that episode to thank for a lot.

III. ON THE BUBBLE

''This life has been a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have
received instructions on where to go and what to do.'' -- Angela

ABC ultimately decided to launch the show at the start of the '94-'95 season;
consequently, the series was produced in periodic ''dribs and drabs,'' says
Herskovitz, and some episodes have a sense of finality to them, as if the
writers didn't know if they were telling their last story. To this day, the
producers believe ABC failed to promote the show properly. Danes, meanwhile,
found time during Life's intermittent and uncertain production to make a
movie: Little Women, which would only bolster her rep as The Next Big Thing.
Alas, even that hype was no match for Friends.

CRUZ: We said goodbye to each other so many times, it was like the boy who
cried wolf.

HOLZMAN: It was very private, as if we were making it for ourselves. ABC, to
their great credit, didn't interfere, due to their respect for Ed and Marshall
-- and because they were so puzzled by the show, they didn't know what to say.

HARBERT: [It might have been] that the show was too truthful. It was tough to
watch. It reminded us of pain, and there's a large segment of the audience
that doesn't want to be reminded of pain.

DANES: Bess was trying to galvanize everyone to promote it more aggressively.
I wasn't so involved in that. I was pretty overextended with acting, school,
trying to, like, grow up.

ARMSTRONG: I felt like Cassandra in the ruins of Troy: I saw what was
happening before it happened. I called Ted Harbert. I said, ''You're letting
this slip away.'' That Thursday-night slot was referred to as ''Hamburger
Hill'' jokingly at ABC. It was their death slot.

HARBERT: Episode number 19 aired on January 26, 1995, and then My So-Called
Life was replaced by the fabulous Matlock.

ZWICK: I remember we had a meeting with Bob Iger and some other ABC
executives. I remember saying ''You do not know what you have.''

HERSKOVITZ: You went further. You said, ''You are giving a voice to hundreds
of thousands of people in this culture who are utterly disenfranchised --
teenagers and particularly teenage girls -- who have no voice of their own.
You should keep the show on for no other reason.''

Harbert agreed, but he was meeting stiff resistance from ABC's sales
department: Due to the show's overwhelming teen demos -- not yet prized in
this pre -- Titanic/Dawson's Creek era -- Harbert says ABC could fetch only a
paltry $50,000 per commercial spot. But the exec had the clout to bring the
show back and, swayed by a massive fan campaign, says he was fully prepared to
do so. Until. . .

HERSKOVITZ: When it was on the bubble, Claire and her parents came to us. She
said she did not want to continue.

ZWICK: This came about after two years where she had been very emotionally
invested in this show. It has been my experience that when an actor is so
engaged, if you trifle with that connection, as a kind of protective
mechanism, they'll say, ''Let me cut off. Let me connect to something else.''

DANES: I honestly don't remember the details.

HARBERT: I've never told the press this: Claire's representatives called. They
said, ''We think she has a big movie career, and we need to alter the
production schedule so she can do movies.'' I knew if I went to management
with that story what the response was going to be. So I threw in the towel,
which I still believe was my biggest mistake at ABC.

HERSKOVITZ: When they heard this about Claire, they were so relieved that they
could use it as an excuse.

DANES: That was really hurtful, because I was 15 at that point, and I really
didn't like being held responsible for the cancellation of the show. I didn't
have that kind of power.

ARMSTRONG: Actually, I don't think there were any bad guys. It was just a
confluence of events. It was a perfect storm. It became way too easy for
everyone to let go.

HARBERT: In my new office at E!, I have a [MSCL] poster closest to my desk.
It's to remind myself of how precious these wonderful little shows are. It
reminds me that these things come along once, and when you get one, you have
to hold on to it for dear life.

In 1995, MTV picked up the syndication rights to My So-Called Life, allowing
the show to live on and flourish through endless repeats. Zwick and Herskovitz
would go on to produce the series Relativity and Once and Again for ABC, and
the features Legends of the Fall and The Last Samurai. Holzman, a
writer-producer on Once and Again, was nominated for a Tony this year for
writing the hit Broadway musical Wicked. Danes continued to make films, and
she can be seen in this fall's Stage Beauty and next year's Shop Girl. The
rest of the cast went on to various degrees of success, Leto more so than the
others. All of them report feeling angry, sad, and even betrayed by the demise
of the series but have mellowed over time. Still, like the fans, they wonder
how Life would have resolved its cliff-hanger, in which Claire drives off with
Jordan, suddenly realizing the love letters he'd given her were actually
written by Brian. Holzman, Zwick, Herskovitz, and Danes all agree: Angela
probably would have given Brian a chance. But, adds Danes, ''I don't see her
marrying either of them.''

DANES: I'm still identified as Angela -- and I've done a lot of different
kinds of work since then. But that role really resonated with people. I am
profoundly grateful for the show, and that it has been as warmly received as
it was, as long as it has. It was really special.

By Jeff Jensen
(Posted:09/10/04)