rewatching My So-Called Life

I'd been dying to watch this show again for years...I kept intending to buy it on DVD but then once I finally decided to get it, it was out of print and used copies were selling for ridiculous amounts of money. Finally this year it occurred to me that the Cornell library might have them, they did! So I borrowed them and have spent the last week watching all 19 incredible episodes.

Buffy is still my favorite show of all time, because I was so invested in it for so many years, but damn, My So-Called Life is now coming in a really really close second.

I don't even know where to start with describing it. It doesn't have some great innovative premise, there aren't any hooks or twists, no formula to follow...it was just simply honest and real stories with great acting. Unlike a lot of other teen shows, it never reaches soap opera territory, and most of it actually takes place at school. And the cast isn't just a bunch of pretty actors who are too old to be playing teenagers. A lot of hard issues were brought up, like drugs, alcohol, sex, homosexuality, homelessness...but none of it felt like an afterschool special.

Everyone thought it was such a shame that ABC cancelled it after only one season, even though it was critically acclaimed by pretty much everyone and Claire Danes won a Golden Globe for it, but now I'm kind of glad that's how it worked out. Too many shows wait until they go downhill to end, and the bad seasons always taint the memory of the good ones. With My So-Called Life, it's really just perfect as it is.

Take this quote: "It just seems like...you agree to have a certin personality or something. For no reason. Just to make things easier for everyone. But when you think about it...I mean, how do you know it's even you?" How amazing is that? That's pretty much how I've feeling for like, the past 10 years.

Although I have to say, while I sympathized with Angela a lot, I'm not really that similar to her. I was never that introspective or emotional, I never had a ridiculous obsessive crush, and I never had the guts to get out of my element and hang out with a different crowd. Though maybe I guess I wish that I had. The truth is that I think the character I related to the most was Brian Krakow.

Yeah, he was a dork. He could be insensitive and he was always saying the wrong things and his crush on Angela despite the way she treated him was pretty pathetic. But the one episode where he did the voiceovers? "There's something about my life. It's just automatically true that nothing actually happens." It's just this ridiculous feeling that you know what you could be doing to change your situation, to make your life better, but for some reason you just can't.

A few more comments:
-- The opening credits. I usually never watch opening credits because they're uninteresting, but I just loved these. The music, the scenes all taken from the pilot...haha, I watched them every single time, even if I watched a few episodes in one sitting.
-- The fashion. Early nineties, I guess, but there was SO MUCH PLAID FLANNEL. The strangest outfit I thought was definitely the plaid pj-type shorts over tights that Angela wore every once in awhile.
-- The girl's bathroom. They spent sooo much time in the bathroom at school. There was never anyone hanging out in the bathroom at my high school...
-- Jordan Catalano. Definitely hot, but I didn't feel like he was that crush-worthy. All that leaning and closing his eyes was almost comical and we didn't get to see nearly enough of what he was thinking.
-- The last episode tied things up relatively nicely, except for Rayanne and Angela's friendship. That's the one thing that I'm going to have to fanwank...they got over it and become friends again.