#Cast of my so called life full
#Cast of my so called life series

Too curious and introverted to be popular and too good-natured and polite to be an outcast Angela exists in that great middle, which to a teenager feels like abandonment in the dark heart of the Atlantic Ocean.Īt the start of her sophomore year Angela is at an acknowledged crossroads as she tries to shed the remaining vestiges of her (perceived) boring youth. Its central character, Angela Chase (Claire Danes), is a typical 15-year old girl, being solipsistic, melodramatic, and touchingly, almost shockingly, perceptive. Without defense or apology this was a show profoundly aware of and comfortable with the average. The writers were clearly more concerned with the unembellished texturing of the character’s milieu, and in revealing the gradations of authentic truths through such a surrounding, than they were with mining the well-trodden conceit of candy colored debauchery lurking just beneath the manicured lawns of sleepy, prosaic neighborhoods. Set in a fictional middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania the series’ setting was familiar rather than trite or purposefully oppressive. There is no Dawson Leary drowning in the creek of his own blathering inanity or Marissa Cooper fumbling around the fashionable houses of Orange County tossing furniture into pools.Īs in real life, the dramatic tension of My So-Called Life emerged organically from the simple accumulation of passing moments and daily experience. The adolescent characters talk with all of the stuttering pomposity and bashful naiveté of real teenagers. There is so little external artifice in the individual plots and overall storyline which a testament to the writers’ knowledge that in adolescence there is little distinction between internal and external chaos.

#Cast of my so called life series

Viewing the series now, more than a decade later, what is most striking is how simple and unpolished it all seems. Ostensibly concerned with the lives of teenagers the show revealed itself to be a greater and more nuanced examination on the interconnectedness of family, friends, time, and place. Debuting after the soapy excess of Aaron Spelling’s 90210 and long before the cultural assault of the (advertiser friendly) WB teen shows, My So-Called Life arrived in the mid ’90s with a refreshing mix of tacit uncertainty and patient observation. To declare My So-Called Life as a groundbreaking, seminal piece of dramatic television seems obvious to the point of being thoroughly obtuse. Thirteen years on it seems that I can finally make room on my shelves and replace those old tapes with a new and impressively handsome DVD set of the complete series. Dusty, scratched, and warped by time and repeated viewings those tapes still sit in my video library. With that in mind I set my VCR each Thursday and recorded each of the 19 episodes that aired over that nine-month period between late 1994 and early 1995. Somehow television executives had slipped up and allowed an authentic, vital and agonizingly real television series to be transmitted into our living rooms. Whether it was the (favorable) advanced press reviews or an instinctual sixth sense something told me that this show would be battling for its survival from its very first episode on. It was clear from the initial print and television advertising that My So-Called Life, while concerned primarily with adolescence, bore little resemblance to such popular, escapist fare as Beverly Hills, 90210. To be perfectly honest, though, my interest in the show did extend beyond the superficial good looks of its resident heartthrob. One look at Jared Leto, dangerously alluring with his mixture of ambiguous soulfulness and relaxed vacuity and there was no question that I would be spending the evening of September 25, 1994, glued in front of my television set.

#Cast of my so called life full

Full of misplaced angst, perpetual confusion, and budding lust, I was an easy demographical target for the ABC Television marketing professionals tasked with promoting their new Thursday night teen drama, My So-Called Life. In the interest of full disclosure, it seems only appropriate that I begin this review by stating that in 1994 I was a young teenage girl.