Nothing on TV Felt Like My So-Called Life

My So-Called Life is now twice as old as its adolescent heroine Angela Chase, but somehow, it hasn’t aged a day. When it premiered on August 25, 1994, the ABC drama introduced Angela, played by then-unknown Claire Danes, as smart, self-aware, anxiety-ridden, and, like every other character on the series, very much a work in progress. So aware of her own imperfections that the knowledge often paralyzed her, Angela’s unreliable narration chronicled the events of the series in naturalistic stream-of-consciousness credibly sprinkled with placeholder words (“like” and “or something” were favorites).

Despite its geological exploration of Angela’s emotional interior, My So-Called Life was conscientiously an ensemble show. From Angela’s high-school classmates, including Wilson Cruz as Ricky Vasquez, the most complex and believable gay teen on television up to that point, and Jared Leto as Angela’s dreamy crush Jordan Catalano, to her parents Patty and Graham (Bess Armstrong and Tom Irwin), therapy-speaking boomers whose hyperarticulate clashes made it clear that Angela’s eloquence wasn’t an anomaly, the series provided ample space to unpack the complexity of its characters. Although My So-Called Life had low ratings and limped through 19 episodes before getting canceled, it had an outsize influence on teen dramas, and drama series generally, serving as a shining example of how to write a group of fully dimensional characters of all ages and life experiences while distributing attention democratically. “I was trying to capture that feeling where you think you’re grown up, but at the same time you’re trying to figure out, How do I be a grown up?” remembers creator Winnie Holzman. “I feel like, at 40, people are also doing that.”

I remember quite vividly the experience of watching the pilot of My So-Called Life and being bowled over by how unlike anything else on TV it was. What can you tell me about the network feedback you got when you were making it?
We had an unusually long gap between when the pilot was shot and when we shot the second episode. ABC was so — how shall I put it? I guess not sure if they felt they could risk doing the show. They were intrigued and admiring but also scared of it.

What were their concerns?
Even though I didn’t talk to them all that much, when I did, they were always going, “Who is it for?” And I remember thinking to myself, Well, isn’t it for the people that end up liking it? Like, why do you have to know, like, ahead of time? I never thought of it as a show just for teens or just for adults. I always thought — which ended up being true — that it could, that it would, find an audience. But back then, that was their big worry. It doesn’t seem like a teen show. It doesn’t seem like a show for adults. There was a way they talked about it, like, Isn’t it kind of serious? Or too serious or something? And I remember thinking, Have you ever watched the 11 o’clock news? This is way back when, before the news got really, you know, apocalyptically bad. But even so, the news, especially the local news, was so fucking depressing. I was always rendered speechless by the idea that there was something dark or depressing about our little show. I knew that wasn’t the case.

And then, towards the middle of that season, I remember hearing something that really got my attention: I wouldn’t hear any actual praise from anyone at the network, from the bigwigs, but what I did hear, in a gossipy way, is that every time one of our rough cuts of a new episode would land at the network — and back then, it was, like, on one of those big tapes, you know? — somebody from the younger generation of people would grab it and put it in a player, and the young people there would watch it. They were running to watch the rough cuts of our next episode. They were hungry for it. And the powers that be were aware of this. They wouldn’t have been unaware of it. I think that might have led to them understanding that the show had a certain amount of drawing power.

Ultimately, I gotta give them credit. I don’t think another network at that time would have put us on the air. I’m very grateful they put the show on the air at all considering how much they worried about it. And I’m also grateful they basically let us do the show our way, which is why it came out the way we wanted it to. They did not interfere very much. And Marshall and Ed really protected me from their network notes. I’m not sure how many there were, but they basically ran interference for me. I barely spoke to the network that year, so I was just focused on writing.

To be fair to ABC, they were consistently the most supportive of formally daring programs of any of the major broadcast networks, going back to the 1960s with the original Batman and The Fugitive. Lost, Twin Peaks, Soap, Moonlighting, The Day After, Roots, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder: all ABC.
That’s right. And the way I started in TV was by getting lucky enough to get hired to write on the last two seasons of thirtysomething, which was also ABC. And look at NYPD Blue. So many great shows that ABC championed!

My So-Called Life was unusual for a show focused on teenagers in that everybody was a fully developed human being, including the parents.
That was exactly my aim. I just wanted them all to be as human and fully dimensional as possible. In high school you often take on this persona, right? Not everyone, but a lot of people. And my thinking was, Maybe the parents themselves are still wrestling with their high school personas and wondering how to drop them, or wondering if they are still real, or if they have to be real. So at the same time Angela and the young people in her life are wrestling with their own identities, the parents are struggling to understand, Do I still have to cart around this high school identity? I’m 40 years old now, can I break free?

How old were you when you were working on My So-Called Life? 
I was probably 39 when I wrote it. And I had just turned 40 when it went on the air.

It feels like it was written by some appallingly young prodigy who had gotten out of high school five years earlier.
One of the casting people said to me that one of the young actors had said, sort of shyly, “Is Winnie a teenager?” That was the highest compliment I could have gotten, because my big fear, of course, was sounding fake.

How does a 40-year-old create teenagers that talk like teenagers at that moment in history, as opposed to how they talked when the writer was in high school?
I had worries about that the whole time. I think I began to believe that my own experience as a teenager, and what I remembered from those around me, couldn’t be that different — that only certain outward details would’ve changed. When I was a teen, the big thing was the war in Vietnam and whether you were for or against it, whether you knew somebody who was there or not. That whole disaster really marked us. But for the lives of the characters on the show, I was thinking the AIDS crisis might have filled that role: The fact that they were just learning about this disease where, if you had sex, you could get it, there was no cure for it, and that it was not just a threat to gay people, that a straight person could get it through sex, or maybe you could get it some other way.

So I decided that there are certain outward manifestations that change from generation to generation, but the inner life, the inner struggles, the secret yearnings don’t change that much. We’re all really more the same than we are different. I clung to that like a life raft just to give myself a sense of confidence — even if it was a false sense of confidence! I just wanted to not go into every script thinking, What do I know? Also, when I was a teenager, I was doing a lot of acting and studying acting, Stanislavski and all that — sense memory, the whole idea of trying to go back to a certain emotional moment in your life. So I trusted all that.

But how did you get into the headspace of an early ’90s teenager, at a practical level? Like, writing the words they were gonna say?
Do you remember Loveline? There was this show with that guy, Dr. Drew Pinsky was his name, and there were a lot of young people on it. I guess some of them might have been in their 20s, but there were teens calling in, asking questions about sex and love. I listened to that sometimes. I’m not saying I stole from that, but it would get me in the mood, and it would assure me that, in other words, life isn’t just special for teens.

It was like when I called you up and I wanted to hear from a journalist’s lips what certain experiences were like, because I was writing a play called Choice that I finally did a production of last spring. It’s a comedy about abortion, but more than that, it’s about a woman’s right to choose. I just wanted to speak to an actual journalist, you know? And I spoke to more than one, and I don’t think there’s anything you said that is quoted exactly in the play, but talking to you helped me feel like, “Okay, certain things I’m doing check out,” or “Certain things you’re saying I could incorporate into my understanding of this world.”

I found ways to get what I needed for the plot of my play, things that would put it in the realm of, Yes, this could easily happen. Here’s another example: I used to go to this restaurant — it’s, of course, closed now — to order a cup of coffee and just sit. There were these two teenage girls behind the counter. One day they were talking about, “What’s the difference between low fat, non-fat, and fat free?” And I thought this was funny, so it’s in the pilot.

There are so many lines that feel eavesdropped on. Another is, “It’s so weird when you see someone you just dreamed about.”  
Yeah! I did a whole episode where everybody’s reporting on what they dreamed, and I do love that line, because, I gotta say: Yes, it is really weird.

We should talk about the actors. Claire Danes and Jared Leto, just by themselves, had an outsized impact.  
Great, great actors of their generation, you know? It was such a joy to write for that cast. I’m still in touch with a lot of them. Beth Armstrong is still a close friend of mine, and so is Mary Kay Place, who brilliantly played Sharon’s mother Camille. And I’m extremely close with Claire. Do you remember, she was having to go to school through all of that? She didn’t get a lot of rehearsal time. She’s doing French class or taking a math test, and then she’s up on a soundstage, and we’re shooting because we have so little time with her that we have to make every second count, so she barely gets to rehearse. And what you see in the pilot, that’s just what she could do at age 14.

Did the network agree she was the one? Or did you get pushback because she was unknown? 
She was the second person we met and it was never a contest. The second we met her, it was like, Well, it has to be her. And then it was a question of, could we persuade her parents? Because they were New Yorkers and they would have to uproot themselves and come out to Los Angeles. It was a big commitment.

Was there a Jordan Catalano in your own life?
Not really. I mean, that’s kind of a made-up person, I have to admit. But I think it’s very real, that person. There were guys I had a crush on, yeah, but they weren’t like Jordan. Maybe a little bit, I don’t know. No one has ever really asked me that! The big difference between me and Angela is that both of the main guys in her life, Jordan Catalano and Brian Krakow, sooner or later fell in love with her, and that never happened to me in high school.

So, you had a Brian Krakow?
I sort of did. But it was an amalgam of several people. They were based on guys I saw and observed in high school. There was a guy I was attracted to, I have no idea what his name was. One time we were lab partners and I was saying something to him — I was pretty shy in high school — and he asked me, “Are you French?” And I thought it was so strange! I guess he thought I was French because I seemed different from other people to him? So in the show where Rayanne says to Jordan, “You know, she’s from France.” I was thinking of that guy.

What a great character, Rayanne. She’s like a brassy dame from a 1940s movie.
I totally made her up. She’s so crazy, let’s face it! But she’s also, like, where you want to be.

How so?
I think it’s perfectly exposited in the pilot, really: She makes danger happen. She doesn’t know when to quit. She doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up. But that’s also exciting, because she’ll do things a normal person wouldn’t do. If you want to change your life, if you want to experiment and try on a whole other persona, which Angela did, Rayanne is the kind of friend you need: someone who will take you places you normally would never go.

It was just such a great cast! Claire was riveting. Jared was riveting. Devon Gummersall as Brian Krakow was riveting, and so was Wilson Cruz. Tom Irwin as Claire’s dad Graham: a totally brilliant actor. And Beth was amazing opposite him, as Patty. Did you know that a lot of people disliked her character?

No, why is that?
Beth was so good at playing a real mother, having uptight moments, having anger, and willing to be angry. You know, an angry woman is very upsetting to the American public. Americans can hardly handle that, even to this day. Beth was willing to be feisty, to be difficult, to be in a bad mood, to be. She was a real person! That was the one bit of feedback I was hearing from the network.

How did you respond? 
I just ignored it. They kept saying to me, “She’s so unlikable.”

Can we talk about Wilson Cruz’s performance as Ricky Vasquez, the gay teenager who’s best friends with Angela and Rayanne? Despite his vulnerabilities and fears, he was very open about who he was in terms of his identity. There had never been a character like that on TV before, certainly not on a network show, and rarely even in movies. Where did Ricky come from?
It’s a twofold thing. When I was a teen, I did a lot of theater, and my best friends were gay boys, guys a little bit older than me who took me under their wing, showed me how to do makeup, showed me how to dress right, and gave me advice about boys. I would sleep in the same bed with them. They were like brothers to me. And there was one boy in high school, like, a year older than me, clearly gay, and he would hang out in the girls room and talk. He wasn’t friends with me. I was too, like, unimportant. But there were girls he was friends with and he would continue these conversations that started outside and come into the girls room and keep talking.

But there’s another element to the character, which is, I had recently seen a documentary called Paris Is Burning, and it really hit me hard. The young men in that documentary were so beautiful, they had so much life, such life force, and it seemed like they worshiped beauty. That’s what I wanted Ricky to be: somebody who had a strong life force and worshiped beauty.

By the way, I didn’t even think of Ricky as quote-unquote gay until later in the season. I didn’t want to label him, like, have him say, “Oh, you know, I’m gay.” It wasn’t going to be that simple. I just wanted him to be extremely feminine, which to me is the most subversive thing you can be, whether you’re a woman or a man. When you’re feminine, there’s something about it that’s, like, dangerous.

In the holiday episode “So-Called Angels,” Ricky finds himself homeless and ends up being taken in by a teacher who happens to be gay and has a male partner. That’s the episode I think about the most besides the pilot. It’s devastating and moving for anybody who finds themselves without a place to land, but probably especially for someone like Ricky.
I know that’s the story for a lot of people. It’s almost like a fantasy that he finds that perfect place where someone opens the door and says, “Come be safe here.” I found out later that something similar had happened to Wilson. This sort of thing happened to me several times during that season, and also other times when I’ve been writing TV. Somebody would say to me, maybe one of the actors: “How did you know?” And I would say, “What do you mean?” And they would go, “Well, that happened to me.” It always makes me feel like I am in touch with the people I’m writing with, and for.
 
Did you ever get network notes about Ricky?
Yeah. We were just about to shoot the scene where he’s in the bathroom with the girls and I got this frantic call from the network. This is one of the few times I remember talking to the network. The call was from a standards and practices guy, right?

The censor.
Yeah. And he’s saying — and he’s really kind of intense! — ”You know, you can’t have him wearing eyeliner, you can’t have him put on more eyeliner.” I can’t remember exactly what I was doing wrong, and I do mean “wrong” in quotes. So I just spoke, like, really fast, and I said, “Listen, you know Michael Jackson? He was just on Oprah’s show, it was the highest rated Oprah show ever on your network, and Michael Jackson fully wears eyeliner, and America loves him, and also, there was a movie this year, which you will be very familiar with, because it had a transgender person in a leading role, called The Crying Game, and the actor who played the transgender person in The Crying Game got nominated for an Oscar, and America embraced that movie, and that all means these things you’re worried about are already embraced by the public.”

Why did you decide to have voice-over narration on the show?
Because when we first started talking about writing the pilot, I was really scared to just write. I was struggling. I was scared. I’d never written a pilot. I was pretty new to TV when Marshall and Ed first met me. Then Ed said to me, “Don’t worry about writing the pilot yet. Just write some diary entries.” Oh, he was so smart to say that to me! So I started to write some diary entries, and I showed them to the guys, and they were like, This is great. This is the show. We talked about the idea that maybe Angela should keep a diary, but it evolved into something else. You never saw her writing in a journal. You never saw her keeping a diary. It was more like you could just hear her thoughts.

I think the narration also had to do with the fact that I was using myself a bit. I was making stuff up a lot, so it’s not factually autobiographical, but it’s emotionally autobiographical. And sometimes my thoughts would be like little, little things. Not finished.

That’s the show. More than anything else, I appreciate how all of the characters seem unfinished, if that makes sense?
Yes, it does make sense. Because every character was in a state of flux. Everyone was trying to figure out who they were. Everyone was trying to figure out their identity. The adults and the children and the kids. One of my biggest things was remembering that, when I was 15, I thought I was so old and knew so much. But I was also trying to experiment, to be more interesting, to be sexy, and thinking, What would that be like? I was trying to capture that feeling where you think you’re grown up, but at the same time you’re trying to figure out, How do I be a grown up? I feel like, at 40, people are also doing that, you know?

What united the parents and the young people is that they were all on this quest to find out, Is there a real me? All the characters seemed unfinished because they weren’t finished. They were all experimenting, trying to figure it out.