newcritics

The Shamus confesses: I have a fondness for My So-Called Life. It only lasted a single season, 19 episodes, but its influence can be felt in shows from Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Gilmore Girls, Freaks and Geeks and Veronica Mars. On Tuesday, Shout Factory releases on DVD, My So-Called Life: The Complete Series. It includes all 19 episodes, a new documentary with writer-creator Winnie Holzman and producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, interviews with star Claire Danes, commentary tracks on numerous episodes and a booklet with witty, perceptive essays by ‘Life’ fans Joss Whedon and Janeane Garofolo.

I’m not sure I want to revisit the entire series again. In fact, I’m certain I won’t. It’s probably got something to do with the way the show cuts to the bone of what teendom and the high school experience is like. And for many of us, as it was for Danes’ character of Angela Chase, high school was a chore and a burden to get through.

And we ourselves were a chore and a burden, too. Who needs all that melodrama again?

I was reminded of that while watching a bit of the pilot episode and the extras on the DVD this week. There is something about the heightened perceptions you have as a teenager, when your radar is being formed and you feel things more acutely than you ever feel them again, that Holzman captured brilliantly in Angela and her voiceover soliloquies. There’s that line of Angela’s about why she’s quitting the yearbook staff. She tells her teacher that if the yearbook ever captured what high school life was actually like, “it would be a really upsetting book.” So many of Angela’s observations ring so true. Did anybody not think about their parents and say to themselves, as Angela does: “Lately, I can’t even look at my mother without wanting to stab her repeatedly.” And yet, watching it for the first time as a parent, I felt such incredible sympathy for Angela’s suffering mother and father, played marvelously by Bess Armstrong and Tom Irwin, and could understand their see-sawing emotions and exasperation at this girl they want to protect, and this young woman they’re preparing to set free. I’m telling you: This show is like the suburban Bergman.

But more than anything, I wanted to hear The Line again. I can recall watching the pilot episode in 1994 and literally gasping at The Line. And there it was again, just as I remembered it:

Teacher: How would you describe Anne Frank?
Angela: Lucky.

I still think that might be the ballsiest bit of dialogue that network TV has ever produced. Not because it dares to say something about Anne Frank, but in the way it perfectly crystallizes the self-absorbed, modern American teenager. That one reaction speaks volumes to everything you feel in your high school years: Moodiness, fluctuating hormones, fear, uncertainty, moments of clarity and weird exhiliration, balanced by a I-gotta-get-out-of-this-place-if-it’s-the-last-thing-I-ever-do mentality. But more than anything, it’s that karmic feeling that your pain is sharper than any pain anybody has ever known. Me, me, me! Poor, poor pitiful, poetic me! You feel trapped and alive at the same instant, and it messes with your head.

I can do nothing but bow down to Holzman’s ability to tap into those memories and bring them so achingly alive in this show. Still, I don’t need to go back. I’m not sure high school ever leaves you, anyway. That’s the brilliance of “My So-Called Life.” (Great title, isn’t it? So self-dramatic!)

One other thing: In the extras, Danes says that she’s never had another character like Angela Chase and she’s always looking. I found that incredibly poignant. It made me wonder what it must be like to be an actor and get the greatest role of your life when you’re 13 or 14, and never find it again. I’m sure Danes has had a nice, so-called life but even show people have feelings that keep them up at night, and I got the strong sense that Danes has thought a lot about whether another Angela will ever come her way again. (Odd trivia: Guess who was the other actress up for the role of Angela? Alicia Silverstone.)

Anyway, if you want to go back with Rickie and Rayanne and Angela and remember the way that Jordan Catalano just…leans, “My So-Called Life” is there for you, starting Tuesday.

OK, one last quote. Kind of topical. Angela on Halloween: “When I was little I, like, worshipped Halloween. And truthfully, part of me still does. ‘Cause it’s your one chance all year to be someone else.”