My So-Called Life has some of that impulse, sure-there’s a great series of scenes that feature kids engaging in the time-honored cliche that is cleaning up a messy house together before the parents come home-but it mostly complicates, and pokes fun at, those divisions. It used to be that network TV shows-dramas, but especially sitcoms-assumed an oppositional relationship between teenagers and adults: One would rebel against the other, and vice versa, through the trajectories of social Darwinism. My So-Called Life foreshadowed, neatly and effortlessly, the generational collisions that are such prominent features of the current cultural moment. Those four words will in that way become loaded and layered, verbal evidence of the ties that bind mothers and daughters, and women and men, and children and adults. Later that episode, we’ll find out that “in my humble opinion” is a favored phrase of Angela’s mother, Patty-one she uses as a way both to assert herself and as an acknowledgement that women aren’t really expected to assert themselves. Because if you made a book of what really happened, it’d be a really upsetting book.” She pauses. But it’s not even what really happened, it’s what everybody thinks was supposed to happen. “It’s like, everybody’s in this big hurry to make this book to supposedly remember what happened. But when you think about it, I mean, how do you know if it’s even you?” She tries to explain why she’s quit yearbook. “Just to make things easier for everyone. “It just seems like you agreed to have a certain personality or something, for no reason,” Angela tells a guidance counselor. The show, as Wired put it in a 2015 assessment, “treated teenagers like people, not just stereotypes of people.” My So-Called Life captures all that, elegantly. It is, even more often, to feel that anything that is not a look from The Person You Like is offensively trivial. To be a teenager is to be a simmering mix of arrogance and anxiety and agony and joy and crippling self-consciousness and even more crippling self-confidence it is, often, to feel that all the beauty and hurt and knowledge the world has ever known can be summoned and captured through one look from The Person You Like. The whole world was that unraveled piece of fabric.” “All I could look at was his shirt collar,” Angela recalls, wondering at her own reaction, “like he was from a poor family and couldn’t afford new shirts. Talking with him at one point-although it should be said that the two exchange, all in all, very few words-she fixates on a string that has come loose from a seam of his shirt. These observations tend to get both emptier and deeper when they involve Angela’s love interest, Jordan Catalano. Like your life just figured out how to get good. “What’s amazing is when you can feel your life going somewhere. You have to develop this, like, combination you-right on the spot.” “What I, like, dread is when people who know you in completely different ways end up in the same area. “I mean, if you stop to think about chewing-like, what it really is. Angela, the show’s protagonist, is particularly prone to making observations about the world that are as profound as they are absurd. Katimsky, recalls of her preternatural acting ability), as a series of tone poems. The show scans, via Danes’s measured delivery (“it’s like a baby knows how to play a Stradivarius,” Jeff Perry, otherwise known as Cyrus Beene but before that known as Mr. Here are, in no particular order, some takeaways: And, given its relaunch on digital platforms that make the old new again, I recently re-watched the series. The show had one very long season, 19 episodes in all, before it was cancelled in 1995. Winnie Holzman’s drama about high-school life, told mainly from the point of view of 15-year-old Angela Chase, didn’t just launch the career of Claire Danes it was also a prestige cable show that happened to air on network TV. The show, low-rated in its time but also beloved far beyond the single season it was given, serves, still, as a touchpoint for teen drama and for quality television in general. My So-Called Life is now streaming on ABC, the network that first aired it back in 1994, right after Kurt Cobain committed suicide and right before O.J.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |