Take a hike, John Hughes. See ya, "Sixteen Candles." Ferris Bueller--it's over. Go home. Breakfast Club, your charter's revoked. There's a new sheriff o' teen angst in this town--calls itself "My So-Called Life." And it's some kind of wonderful.
ABC's new Thursday night drama series--produced by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, of the cultural icon "thirtysomething"--has taken the critics by storm, from Entertainment Weekly to The New York Times to Rolling Stone. But for some Byzantine reason, the show has consistently placed in the bottom 10 of the Nielsen ratings, behind such FOX fodder as "M.A.N.T.I.S." and "Models, Inc." Why? What dark force of TV hell lurks in the minds of the couch-potato Nielsen families, who apparently think "Full House" the stuff of legend? Perhaps the answer to this question is so mind-numbingly horrible that it is best left unanswered.
That doesn't mean, however, that in the next several hundred words we won't try to convince you that "My So-Called Life" is the best hour of TV since "Hill Street Blues," "St. Elsewhere" or "The A-Team." So pop open a cold one (or, if you're an English major, cop a lattZ), kick your feet up and prepare yourself for a journey into TV drama at its angst-ridden finest.
In the first episode of "MSCL," created by former "thirtysomething" writer Winnie Holzman, 15-year-old protagonist Angela Chase, played by stunning newcomer Claire Danes, waxes philosophical on school, love and the whole hormone-ridden gamut of teenage emotions. "School is a battlefield for your heart," she cries earnestly, and the viewer can't help but believe her.
Angela is vying desperately for the attention of one sultry Jordan Catalano, played by Jared Leto, who nails his character's tender-eyed, quiet manner, straight out of the pages of a J. Crew catalog (except that when his clothing looks "broken-in," that's because it is; Jordan is no 90210-clone). As per standard high-school crushes, Angela seems to get nowhere.
Despairing about the progression of her seemingly hopeless romance, Angela says, "I always imagined I'd fall in love nursing a blind soldier who was wounded in battle. Or maybe while rescuing someone's life in the middle of a blizzard. I thought at least by the age of 15 I'd have a love life, but I don't even have a like life."
This lack of experience, however, doesn't stop Angela from offering her opinion, mostly in voice-overs, about what that love life should be like. "Love is when you look into someone's eyes and suddenly you go all the way inside, like to their soul, and you both know instantly," she says. By her own admission, she has never even come close to love--so where does she get off serving up tightly packed platitudes about it? That's the beauty of the show: She doesn't. And therein lies her charm.
Angela--unlike the viewer--often seems to forget that she's just a kid. But the show works because we've all been there; we've all believed that our "crush" was actually the nascent birth of True Love. The writing is so on-target that it takes one back to those days of adolescent-minded (but real, damn it!) longings and reminds the viewer how "crush" got its name.
Angela isn't the only one with problems, of course. Also making their way through the middle of the teenage wasteland are her best friends, Rayanne and Rickie. And this is where "MSCL" truly distinguishes itself as the best TV has to offer, especially among those, such as "The Wonder Years," dealing with teenage trials and tribulations. Rather than relegating the supporting cast to the role of Angela-foil, as was often the case for Paul and Winnie from "The Wonder Years," the writers give each character a well-conceived and deftly written identity.
Take, for example, Rickie Vasquez, played with breathtaking sensitivity and nuance by Wilson Cruz. Rickie (along with Cruz) is openly gay, one of the few such characters on network TV. And "MSCL" does not shy away from dealing with his sexuality--unlike "Melrose Place," whose Matt is mere Aaron Spelling bleeding-heart tokenism.
In the finest episode yet, Rickie is heartbroken to learn that a cute guy (androgynously named "Cory") whom he liked and thought gay is actually interested in Rickie's best friend, Rayanne, given impish glee by actress A.J. Langer. After hearing this (from Cory himself), Rickie says to Angela, "I belong nowhere, with nobody. I don't fit, anywhere."
Cruz, who says that the writers used him as the basis for Rickie, comments, "That's straight out of my life. It was a huge lake of emotions and I would drown in them every day. You spend all of your time trying to figure out who you are and at the same time for me I was trying to figure out where I fit in and why I didn't fit in in some places and trying to deny exactly what I knew for a fact, which is that I'm gay, and I didn't want to deal with it then.
"And then you get to a point when you think you can deal with it, like at a dance, and you think someone is actually interested in you, and you're blown out of the water. And it's heartbreaking. Now I look back and I don't understand how I got through it alive."
This is the kind of realism that makes "MSCL" so perfect. Whether dealing frankly with Rickie's sexuality or Rayanne's alcoholism (you never saw that on "The Wonder Years"), the show refuses to pull its punches. Problems that the characters face are not simply dealt with and subsequently dismissed; instead, they are maintained consistently and compellingly throughout the story line and between episodes.
Angela's coterie of friends--Rayanne and Rickie--would form a nice, neat little circle if not for the anomalies of Sharon Cherski (played sweetly by Devon Odessa) and Brian Krakow (the endearingly awkward Devon Gummersall), both of whom are friends from Angela's early childhood and do not "fit" so easily into her teenage years. Iconoclast Rayanne has supplanted Sharon, the girl with a little too much school spirit, as the best friend, which creates tension between all involved.
Brian is an infinitely engaging character. He is the misunderstood and neglected "class brain" with the social skills of a lemur. And he is also hopelessly in love with Angela--which, of course, means that she steps all over him.
"Whoever's withdrawing from you is who you reach for," Gummersall says. "I think Brian really does care for Angela. There are always certain points when he's there for her."
Brian, more so than anyone else in the show, is the easiest character to identify with. At one time or another, we've all felt like him, left out of the "in" crowd (and in his case, probably the "out" crowd as well) and alienated because of something about us that we really can't control. Brian, in this sense, is perhaps even more iconographic of teenage angst than Angela, in his nigh-complete isolation from those around him. Angela, Rayanne and Rickie have each other; Brian has only himself and the image, not the reality, of them.
Compared to the other characters, Jordan seems to be the least developed and most one-dimensional. Because one receives only snippets of him through Angela's eyes, the viewer is tempted to reduce him to "brooding hot-boy."
In this sense the writers appear to falter in their usual pattern of complex characters, resorting simply to a puerile stereotype. This characterization, however, is an essential function of the plot.
In order for us to empathize and obsess with Angela about Jordan, we must view Jordan as Angela does--as "brooding hot-boy"--because at the start of Angela'a infatuation, that is exactly the extent of her knowledge of him, despite ever-so-earnest protestations to the contrary.
"I'm in love," she insists. "His name is Jordan Catalano. He was left back twice. Once, I almost touched his shoulder in the middle of a pop quiz." True love this is not.
Thus, what seems to be weak writing turns out to be a carefully constructed narrative tool that allows the viewer to experience--instead of just witness--Angela's so-called "love" for the beautiful and deceivingly complex high-school hunk.
Leto also refuses to characterize Jordan as simply one-dimensional.
"I think Jordan's just a kid," he says. "He's just a normal, 17-year-old, high-school kid that just happens to have a problem reading and is a little withdrawn from it. I knew a lot of guys like Jordan when I was in high school.
"I don't think he's really aware of Angela--how huge her crush was--or ways that people might look at him. He's just a normal, high-school kid."
Jordan and the rest of the teens aren't the only ones who benefit from the show's realism. Patty and Graham Chase, Angela's parents, are portrayed with absolute brilliance by Bess Armstrong and Tom Irwin. One cannot say enough about these two actors, but Odessa gives it a try: "Tom and Bess are equally amazing. They're just it. They're beyond awesome."
Patty is an intense, driven career woman, Graham a budding gourmet chef uninterested in the fast-track life. These two are no cardboard-cutout icons of all things parental. Patty and Graham are a real married couple; they talk, they fight, they make up and they even make love. They have not perfected the art of marriage, let alone the art of parenting.
Case in point:
Patty: I, like all women, am becoming less and less attractive in the eyes of the world, more and more expendable as I get older, while you, like all men, are considered more desirable and more attractive the older you get. Of course, you'll die sooner.
Graham: That's right. [Checks his watch] Well, we better have sex right now, then.
"There is no course you can take to prepare you for [parenting]," Armstrong says. "You just suddenly find yourself facing one of those sort of classic parent-child conflicts one day and you look at each other and you take a deep breath and you dive in. And that's what Patty and Graham do, together.
"What I like about [the show] is that one week, we can be fighting in an episode, sort of annoyed with each other, and the next week we can be having a really nice time together. Which is certainly my experience in marriage... I think that the fact that the writers portray that without apology is courageous and insightful."
For the first time in recent memory, a TV show has decided that instead of prostituting itself to the Nielsen beast and tailoring its content to that meretricious end, it will simply be itself, and be real. "Reality is to [the writers and producers] a challenge, not something to be brushed aside," Armstrong says. Audiences, however, seem to have more interest in shows that make them comfortable rather than those that make them think--hence the low ratings.
Odessa speculates on the reason for the poor ratings: "One word--timeslot. [The show airs at 8 p.m., opposite "Mad About You."] The NBC lineup kills us. My grandma always says the time's wrong because `People are out muckin' the stalls' [Odessa is from West Virginia]. But ABC believes in us and I really have faith."
So do we. Hopefully, ABC will see beyond the numbers, recall that "Cheers" was the lowest-rated show in its first season, and stand behind the true gem it has in "My So-Called Life." Watch it. Love it. Feel it. It'll change your so-called existence.
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