The notion of “brilliant but canceled” television as we know it today more or less originated with the untimely death of My So-Called Life. Sure, there were plenty of victims of network douchery before 1995, but few were as overwhelmingly well-received by critics and none elicited the kind of reaction that Life fans gave when their show was taken from them. My So-Called Life was that beautiful, charming baby you just knew was going to grow up to be a senator or something. But ABC locked it in a car seat and backed that car into a lake.
If you’re a TV fan of a certain age (especially you ladies), the significance of My So-Called Life isn’t rivaled by many other shows. As Ginia Bellafante wrote in The New York Times this weekend, “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.” So I won’t. Instead, I’ll just express my joy that a modestly priced (and well packed) complete series DVD finally exists. I’m particularly happy because My So-Called Life has the distinction of making one of my all-time favorite Halloween episodes. For one night, Life abandoned the über-realism of high school melancholy and embraced ghosts and time travel when Angela summoned the spirit of a student who died back in the 60s. It was never explained. It made no sense. And it was wildly entertaining. I’ll be buying the set if only for the timely release and my renewed need to watch that episode.
I do think some folks tend to give a little too much credit to My So-Called Life in regards to the stellar high school dramas that followed. Life certainly influenced shows like Buffy and Freaks & Geeks and maybe even Veronica Mars and Friday Night Lights, but the real reason for shows like these (and Life before them) was the shift in the way we made and watched television and the unusual cultural climate of 90s America. My So-Called Life just happened to come on the scene when TV was still stuck in the 80s, so that strange feeling of authenticity sometimes seems unique to it. If you’re able to forget about the monster that Jared Leto has become for at least 42-minutes at a time, you might still be able to recapture that feeling yourself.
MSCL is okaaay but I always found the show exhausting and full of characters I wouldn’t want to be friends with in real life. I like happy people. My money’s going towards Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition this week. Much more cult, much more classic, and has a creepy demon little person. What’s not to love?