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DVD Set Assuages Fans' 'So-Called Life' Obsession

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By GINIA BELLAFANTE The New York Times

Published: October 28, 2007

To a certain sort of woman who is somewhere between late youth and an unacknowledged middle age, the name Jordan Catalano isn't a television reference - it is a sense memory. You don't recall Jordan Catalano - you feel him, as you do the erotic miscalculations of your own adolescence.

During a nine-month period between 1994 and 1995 when 'My So-Called Life' was broadcast at 8 p.m. on ABC (alas for its ratings, opposite 'Mad About You'), Jordan existed as the obsession of Angela Chase, the high school sophomore played by Claire Danes, whose defining state of melancholy he interrupted and enforced.

Those who followed Angela's tenuous encroachments on womanhood followed passionately, continuing to immerse themselves long past the show's cancellation after 19 episodes. Fan sites for 'My So-Called Life' endure online, one of them in Swedish.

They will tell you that Jared Leto (Jordan) is the lead vocalist of a group called 30 Seconds to Mars and that A.J. Langer, who portrayed the hardscrabble Rayanne, married the son of the 18th Earl of Devon.

Danes, of course, has gone on to movie roles and now Broadway, where she is starring in 'Pygmalion.'
Pauline Kael once said of the young Molly Ringwald that she possessed a 'charismatic normality.' Danes infused Angela with something else, a slouchy, endearing neurasthenia that seemed to befit the indolent mood of the mid-'90s.

It is largely because of online fan activism that a definitive DVD boxed set of the complete series, including interviews with Danes, other cast members and writers, will be released Tuesday. A previous compilation, issued five years ago, went out of production not long after it arrived but caused great consternation before it vanished. The devoted criticized its shoddy quality and negligence on the matter of bonus features.

To claim that 'My So-Called Life' is great, watershed television is to say something so firmly ingrained in the conventional wisdom that it hardly bears repeating. The series brought us the experience of adolescence outside the bounds of artifice, peril and pathology that had provided the context for nearly every other depiction of teenagers on television.

Groundbreaking In Its Normalcy

Here, what it meant to be 15 was not to discover that you suddenly had to raise your 6-year-old sister or that you might be pregnant with twins but merely that you suffered everyday indignities: overhearing people talk behind your back, the plop of a grim-looking lump of mashed potatoes on a pallid cafeteria tray.

'My So-Called Life' took us deeply inside the head of a decidedly middle-class girl whose grievances with the world were confined to an aching crush, the wish that her mother wouldn't insist on well-balanced meals and her belief that social studies ought to be less boring. Although the agonies of adolescence were felt catastrophically, they weren't weighted with enormous consequence. At no point were we instructed to think that the lapses of youth would define the people we might become.

Angela goes to public high school in suburban Pittsburgh, where she thinks of almost nothing but a great-looking boy who is more than that only in her estimation. 'I'm in love,' she recounts to the audience in one of the show's diaristic voice-overs. 'His name is Jordan Catalano. He was left back. Twice. Once I almost touched his shoulder in the middle of a pop quiz.'

There is never any question that Angela and Jordan are doomed as a couple. The show gently mocks her infatuation, cutting to Jordan applying eyedrops whenever she begins to read in his intense blinking the signs of poetic torture. Where she sees soulfulness, we know there is merely corneal irritation and presumably a bad habit.

Television gives us teenage lust exercised or teenage lust repressed, but rarely does it evoke the way young people translate their carnal urges into something they understand as a deeper abiding affection.

'My So-Called Life' is essentially a study of a young mind processing desire into something less terrifying and more easily justified - substantiating it with false hopes. And in that regard, it is more than a good TV show; it is a good TV show that attains the dimension and complexity of literature. 'My So-Called Life' deals with innocence sustained, but it offers a no-less-illuminating view of what it is to be young because of it.

The series, created by Winnie Holzman for producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Hershkovitz, all of whom had worked on 'thirtysomething,' arrived before television began catering so aggressively to teenage tastes. Perhaps its morose and ragged appeal is best appreciated against the backdrop of what followed: an endless stream of teenage dramas that both recall and point it up as an essay embalmed in time about a way of being 15 that no one will ever experience again.

'My So-Called Life' imagined parents and teens operating out of separate, oppositional emotional spheres. It recognized adolescence as a psychological phase with a beginning and end, and though that might seem a common-sense approach to the show's subject, contemporary television rarely seems to take it.

Angela's parents live in a small Arts and Crafts house and run a printing press. They worry that they are spending too much time together or too much time apart. Her father wants a career change; her mother seeks connection.

Angela peers into their world of uneasy domesticity but has no interest in occupying it; she is too busy trying to discover why her nerdy friend Brian told everyone that she slept with Jordan Catalano when she was so nowhere near ready to do that.

It seems worth noting that the first words in the debut episode of 'My So-Called Life' are: 'Excuse me? Can you spare some change for a phone call?' A teenager before the era of cell phones and e-mail, Angela got to move freely, beyond the parental surveillance systems so methodically deployed today. Angela's father, Graham (Tom Irwin), and mother, Patty (Bess Armstrong), did not know where she was every minute or what her friends were all about; they disciplined and worried and set rules, and sometimes Angela lied and broke them.

A Different Time For Teens

'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.

By the time 'The OC' arrived in 2003, it had become clear that not even delinquents could escape from academic rigor anymore. The series begins with a public defender rescuing a teenage car thief from detention, but not before it is revealed that the thief had scored in the 98th percentile on his SATs.

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.

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