The Voice of Winnie Holzman  

My So-Called Life is full of Angela Chase's voice. As the protagonist, the young teen's thoughts — unfiltered, emotional, hilarious, self-involved — are threaded in voice-over throughout the series. The painful realism of Angela's inner monologue is indebted to the expressiveness of her portrayer, Claire Danes. But the source of Angela's voice is mostly that of then-forty-year-old creator, Winnie Holzman, whose writing and vision permeate the nineteen episodes. Like most American network television series, My So-Called Life was written by a team of writers who shared an understanding of the program's narrative arcs. Individual writers would write scripts, then revise them based on notes from Holzman and executive producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, with Holzman herself scripting the pilot and five other episodes. No American television series is accurately attributable to a single person. But MSCL was unusual in its mid-1990s era for so fully expressing the voice of its creator. That this creator was a woman was also unusual, especially for prime-time drama, rather than comedy, where women had a longer history of exerting creative control. That a woman's vision — and a girl's voice — drove this dramatic series made it stand out against the TV of its time.  

MSCL was an important step forward in Holzman's writing career, one that would solidify her status in the TV industry. It would also turn out to be her most substantive contribution to television, one that made MSCL stand out from previous teen dramas and that would influence the writing of teen series, and of prime-time interpersonal drama more broadly, thereafter. While Holzman would write for several notable series after MSCL, her TV career ended up rather short-lived, which helped to solidify her contribution to the medium as unique and distinctive.  

This is because, in the early 2000s, Holzman returned to her roots (an MFA in musical theatre writing from NYU) to write the book — the script and the narrative — for the Broadway sensation, Wicked. Wicked brought Holzman a financial windfall. By 2012, she had earned $95 million from it; that amount has surely ballooned in the interim.1 Now seventy years-old, Holzman has had little reason to venture back to the cutthroat TV industry. Her recent writing has centered on Wicked in the form of the screenplays for the musical's two-part filmic adaptation. She has continued to write for the stage, as well, most recently with Choice, her aptly titled "pro-choice play." This work combines everyday realism with offbeat fantasy through the story of journalist Zippy Zunder remembering her own abortion while reporting on women who "discover" the souls of their aborted fetuses in living people. Holzman is quite aware that such boundary-pushing writing is feasible thanks to her unusual degree of creative and financial autonomy. As she noted to American Theatre magazine, "The success of Wicked gave me the freedom and the responsibility to write this play."2

In what follows, I examine the roots of Holzman's style as developed in My So-Called Life. As Holzman's first creation to reach a wide audience, the series encapsulated both the major themes and the small touches that would mark her work across television, into Wicked, and beyond. At the center of that work are the voices and experiences of adolescent girls, their fraught and loving connections with one another, their roles within broader communities, and their power in imagining a world where their voices matter. Holzman's writing treats her characters of all ages and genders with a loving empathy that is unusual in mainstream American entertainment, where characters more often fulfill archetypal functions that advance plot. In contrast, Holzman's writing invites audiences to understand her characters as multi-dimensional beings, sometimes admirable, sometimes flawed, but always worthy of our recognition and grace. Holzman's work encourages this degree of empathy most significantly for the girls and "difficult" adult women she scripts, which is especially notable in a mainstream media culture wherein girls and women are afforded such attributes less often than are masculinized figures. These tendencies have contributed to Holzman's success beyond TV and have made her TV writing a foundational influence.  

My So-Called Life exemplifies the richness of Holzman's characters through both their individual traits and their connections with one another. It is through Angela's relationships that she begins to develop her sense of self, to come into her own. The love triangle that the series develops between Angela, Jordan, and Brian is one important dynamic. But running alongside it are at least three other "triangles": the friendship triangles of Angela, Rayanne, and Sharon and of Angela, Rayanne, and Rickie; and the familial triangle of Angela and her parents, Patty and Graham, as their marriage falters. Perhaps the central conceit of the series is Angela's move away from Sharon, her childhood best friend, and toward her new, more dangerous friendships, mostly with Rayanne, but also with Rickie and, romantically, Jordan. These dynamics put interpersonal conflict at the center of the narrative. Angela's relationship with Rayanne is arguably her most painful, given that Rayanne betrays her by having sex with Jordan. But Holzman's empathetic writing encourages the audience both to regret Rayanne's behavior and to root for her happiness, which Holzman invites by crafting new relationships, such as the unexpected friendship between Rayanne and Sharon.   

The joy and the heartache of girls' relationships with one another are among MSCL's most resonant depictions. That the girls are all white and straight makes for a limited representation of youthful, feminine adolescence. But Angela's connection to Rickie, the effeminate, gay, Black, Latino boy who starts out as Rayanne's sidekick but who begins to find his own voice and to claim his own space, does some work to diversify the on-screen world. While it is unfair to expect one character to carry the burden of diversifying the entire series, in the mid-1990s, the very presence of and attention to Rickie made MSCL an unusual entry in the burgeoning space of teen TV drama, which was still largely white and straight. 

It is not only the teen characters but also the adults whom Holzman paints so multi-dimensionally. Most notable is her attention to Angela's mother, Patty Chase. Formerly a high school popular girl, now a take-charge businesswoman wound tightly with worry, Patty may be Angela's primary nemesis. She is the one who disapproves of Angela's new hair color — and her new friends. Patty's initial discomfort with Rickie suggests her privileged prejudice, seemingly rooted in homophobia, albeit likely tinged by racism and classism. Her strained relationships not only with Angela, but with Graham and with her own parents, help us to see Patty as a long-rewarded "good girl" who now fears falling short of the expectations she places upon herself, an accomplished and impressive woman whose insecurities and anxieties lurk just under her smiling, together facade. That she is ultimately a safe space for Angela, and that she comes to offer care and comfort to Rickie, helps to redeem her from her less admirable traits.  

The series is primarily invested in these interpersonal relationships and their affective power. But the characters also engage with the injustices of the broader world. Rickie's coming out path, against the backdrop of his challenging home life, is one such narrative. Across the season, the teenage characters begin to develop their own perspectives and engagement with a world beyond the personal. That world includes dangers, like a gun in school. Angela has a sense of self-worth from the outset, but she begins to find a voice to speak out about that broader world, to stand up for what she finds to be just. In "The Substitute" she moves from voicing the protective logic of her parents to arguing for students' free speech rights. Angela even recognizes the injustice of her own privilege when the school principal, a Black man, declines to suspend her for distributing the banned literary magazine. She sees the power of her earnest, white, professionally dressed parents surrounding her in the principal's office; she realizes that not everyone would be treated with such deference. 

Angela regularly makes mistakes. Part of the series' humor is in its loving awareness of the characters' misreading of many situations. Yet the program never judges Angela, as is typical of Holzman's work, wherein each character is a fully rounded human, beset by flaws, but always treated as worthy of audience investment and care. Holzman uses specific stylistic techniques to engender this empathy. Most typically, the events of a given episode are linked, often across characters' storylines, by a unifying motif. For example, in the series' finale, multiple characters' dreams are woven throughout the script. Some are represented visually, some described in dialogue. In each case, the dream reveals a character's hidden wishes, their motivations, even if they cannot or would not express or act upon those desires. The point is that we gain insight into each character's inner life. Even as some characters' dreams conflict with others', we are made to understand the feelings that feed their actions.  

These motifs take various form in different moments of MSCL, though certain patterns persist across the series and across Holzman's writing. Like other TV dramas centered on interactions amongst a community of characters (rather than rooted in a more procedural environment), MSCL structures moments of narrative impact around community events; the event can be the motif as it resonates across different characters' experiences. Once such event is the school's World Happiness Dance, a typical setting in a teen series. In this episode "Life of Brian," most of the characters are miserable, and each experience of pain ignores and even deepens that of others. Angela rejects Brian as she pursues Jordan; Brian rejects Delia as he pursues Angela; Corey rejects Rickie as he pursues Rayanne. These dynamics produce a humor of recognition for the audience amidst the visibility of the characters' pain. The event of the dance drives the plot but, more importantly, it drives the emotional convergence of multiple relationships. 

Bringing characters to confront their emotions and each other through events is one type of motif. Another is the convergence of characters around a meaning-laden object. This is a style less typical of other series (in the 1990s or since) but it is a Holzman hallmark. In MSCL, letters and notes become deeply meaningful objects in multiple episodes. In "Why Jordan Can't Read," Angela's written outpouring of her feelings about Jordan makes its way into Rayanne's hands and then is lost during their art museum field trip. Jordan returns it to Angela without having read it and it becomes the impetus for their newfound connection. A letter brings them together again in the final episode, even as Jordan's missive full of confession and emotion was written by Brian, a cipher for his own romantic feelings. 

Holzman's thematic devices also center on references, both literary and musical. Jordan and Brian's Cyrano de Bergerac interplay is typical of the literary allusions Holzman employs. The Diary of Anne Frank is a threaded throughout the pilot; "Betrayal" features a school production of Our Town; English teacher Mr. Katimsky engages the students with Shakespearean sonnets. In each case, the characters connect the canonical narrative to their own experience, often in ways that betray their youthful self-absorption while also exposing profound truths. Holzman is clearly impassioned about literature, but she has a similar affinity for music, with musical references playing prominent roles. Whether in the dramatic encounters of the Buffalo Tom concert, in Rayanne joining Jordan and Tino's band, in Jordan's opus, "Red" (referencing his car, not Angela's Crimson Glow hair), or in Delia and Rickie 's exuberant "What is Love?" dance, musical elements have a diegetic presence that helps them speak meaningfully to character experience.  

These meaningful narrative devices — community events, symbolic objects, and literary and musical references — were atypical of American network television in the 1990s and remain so across the TV landscape today. But the way that Holzman used these devices to enrich her depiction of a narrative world in which audiences are encouraged to empathize with the perspectives of multiple characters has a longer history. The increasingly serialized television of the 1980s and 1990s brought more and more of this mode of storytelling to the small screen. The practice of seeing narrative events from multiple characters' perspectives was a long-time pattern of the daytime soap opera, as was the staging of big events as a space where the dynamics of character relationships came to an explosive head. But the bigger budgets, smaller casts, and drastically fewer episode orders of prime-time dramas allowed for a kind of episode-by-episode crafting that daytime could not regularly access. To many, this late-twentieth century period became a "golden age" of TV storytelling, and MSCL fit well within that category.3

Holzman's big break as a TV writer came when Herskovitz and Zwick hired her to write for their 1980s drama series, thirtysomething, in its third (of four) seasons. Beginning with thirtysomething and continuing across multiple projects, Herskovitz and Zwick's company, Bedford Falls, was one source of the "golden age" programming associated with this era. Their series were known for offering "personal" narratives that could "deliver the emotional goods" alongside creative storytelling and production strategies.4 thirtysomething (ABC, 1987-1991) was heralded for its combination of insightful attention to its characters' inner lives (what some would more derisively call navel-gazing) alongside postmodern fantasy and dream sequences. When she came on board, Holzman tended to write episodes that focused on the series' women characters and her scripts included flashbacks, fantasies, and specific references to the women's girlhood selves. In season four's "Melissa and Men," Melissa remembers the high school attentions of the Brian Krakow-like Leonard Katz, whom she ignored while staring at the Jordan Catalano-like bad boy down the hall. Holzman also explored relationships between women, as in a sub-plot about Hope and Susannah, Gary's reticent new wife, coming to a new understanding and acceptance of each other's choices. Patty Chase's "difficultness" has roots in characters like the outwardly-perfect-yet-prickly Hope and the standoffish Susannah. Holzman's literary references fit right in as well, as in her scenes between English professor Gary and a spectral Emily Dickinson, whose poetry he is struggling to teach.5 

When thirtysomething ended, Zwick and Herskovitz had an open invitation to create a new show for ABC, and they sought to fulfill a long-germinating idea about a series told from the perspective of a teenage girl. Their earlier TV job was writing for the 1970s drama series, Family (ABC, 1976-1980), where they were constantly constrained in their efforts to write "anything the least bit subversive or rebellious, or normal" for the Lawrences' teen daughter, Buddy (Kristy McNichol).6 They turned to Holzman for her ability to access the teen girl mind. She began by writing a stream of consciousness-style diary for this hypothetical protagonist, from which Angela was born. 

Despite its relatively short, one-season life, MSCL's influence on TV storytelling was massive. For one, Holzman continued to work on Herskovitz and Zwick's shows, most notably Once & Again (ABC, 1999-2002), where she employed her MSCL-honed style to stories of the loving and conflicted relationship between adult sisters Lily and Judy and to the pains and pleasures of girlhood. The series tells the story of two (upper middle-class, white) families that come together when the soon to be divorced Lily falls in love with Rick, a divorced father of two. In episodes she wrote, Holzman used many of the same techniques she had used in MSCL: engendering empathy toward the "difficult" woman, in this case Rick's ex-wife, Karen; an open embrace of young people exploring their sexuality; literary references; and storytelling that uses different characters' encounters with an object or event to reveal their perspectives on a theme. Holzman's season two episode, "Thieves Like Us," converges around a container of cosmetic glitter. All three of the program's girl characters, Zoe, Grace, and Jessie, covet the glitter, and we eventually learn that it belongs to Karen, a crusading lawyer who "didn't even used to wear make-up" but who is trying to find her way back into a dating life post-divorce.7 Each of these characters is drawn to the glitter for different reasons, distinctive and messy but united in a struggle to define their own femininity. 

Holzman worked on Once & Again while developing Wicked in partnership with composer Stephen Schwartz. A fan of MSCL who was familiar with Holzman's musical theatre background, Schwartz was eager to partner with her on this project, especially because he found her to be "particularly good at writing female characters who are funny, real and believable."8 The project was always focused on the relationship between witches Glinda and Elphaba, rooted in their roommate days at school, but Holzman made key contributions to deepen that relationship, to bring its conflicts and commitments into focus, for example by developing the love triangle between the two and Fiyero. While the story peaks with Elphaba coming into her own power and voice, Holzman made sure to give both girl-witches a multi-dimensional depth. In her hands, Glinda was not just the superficial popular girl of privilege; rather, she was written as another of Holzman's characters "who have problems, who behave badly, who have much to learn, who lie, who do things without knowing why."9 

Holzman's style had been sharpened through her TV work, and especially through MSCL. Her writing was so attuned to the screen that she drafted Wicked's book using screenwriting software.10 Because the scenes and dialogue she developed were always intertwined with Schwartz's music, she drew on her background in TV (and as a poet, her focus as an undergraduate English major at Princeton) to achieve the combination of brevity and meaning essential for a stage musical.11 Wicked debuted on Broadway in 2003, but Holzman did return to TV once more, in 2010, when she co-created a ten-episode season of the ABC Family series, Huge, with her daughter, Savannah Dooley. Though made outside the Bedford Falls shingle, the series — set at a summer camp for overweight teens — includes long-standing Holzman touches: young people exploring their sexuality; a sympathetic, if "difficult" woman in Dorothy Rand, the camp's leader; big events, as in "Talent Night," where the teen characters trespass on each other's boundaries. As Holzman notes, "I like to find things like that and have it happen all over everywhere in different ways."12 The episode also uses music to narrate character feelings, as in Ian's song about the pain in growing up. 

Except for Huge, Holzman put TV writing in the past after the success of Wicked. But she has long understood the power of TV storytelling to tell intimate stories about flawed characters striving to come into their own. Early on, she got to do just that by creating and leading My So-Called Life through its one compelling season. Its impact on Holzman's own career is clear — it set the template for her work to follow, not only in TV but also on stage and the cinematic screen. It also fed into a legacy of TV storytelling focused on teens learning to speak in their own, powerful voices. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003) creator Joss Whedon called MSCL "the benchmark, the gold standard" to which he aspired.13 When writer Greg Berlanti began creating teen-oriented drama with Everwood (The WB, 2002-2006), he claimed that his writing staff would "reference the show at least once a week." One 2004 retrospective declared that the series "defined the modern family drama" and "influenced an entire generation of television writers."14 As Holzman's MSCL protégé and Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006-2008, The 101 Network, 2008-11) showrunner Jason Katims has noted of Holzman's work on MSCL, she "really looked at the show as an art form" and "was always able to access the emotion in every scene."15 It was Winnie Holzman's voice that helped make stories of flawed girls and women central to prime-time dramatic storytelling and to American popular culture in the three decades since MSCL's single, indelible season.  

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Elana Levine (@ehl.bsky.social) is professor of media, cinema, and digital studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History (Duke University Press, 2020) and Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Duke University Press, 2007), co-author of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012), editor of Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and co-editor of Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Duke University Press, 2007). In the mid-1990s, she was a proud member of Operation Life Support, the fan effort to save My So-Called Life, and still has the t-shirt to prove it.

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