My So-Called Life at 30

Edited by Danielle Fuentes Morgan

Introduction

It was the summer of 2006 and I’d just met a guy and couldn't stop daydreaming about him. He was good looking with piercing blue eyes and dark hair. He was quiet and cool. Beyond those details, I didn't know that much about him and didn't want to learn yet, lest too much pulling at the fabric of my desire unravel the whole thing. Looking at his pretty face was enough. 

My best friend didn't live in the same city as me and as a result never met him, but she knew all about him anyway. She and I occasionally talked on the phone, but most of our communications were through lengthy emails, which functioned with the intimacy and freedom of a shared diary. It's hard to explain in 2025 because the narrativity of the lengthy email is an antiquated and almost quaint art form now. But these were the days before unlimited phone minutes and non-stop text conversations about minutiae. 

Each email had plot and voice. Both of us had been English majors and writers, and the epistolary form allowed the sender lexical precision and the recipient the chance to read and reread each communication before responding with parallel verbosity. The emails covered everything. We discussed the existential crisis of early-20s life, failures and successes at work, American Idol, and new friends and crushes as we transitioned into independent adulthood. I regaled her with stories from all my nights at bars with hometown friends, and those occasional fleeting evenings where my hope to run into him panned out. In these nights existed moments when I had an excuse to look quietly in his direction while he looked quietly at me, over the shoulders of the friends to whom we were ostensibly listening.  

With the clear-eyed accuracy that only a dear friend at a distance can offer, she began an email: "You always say his entire name when you talk about him. He's like your Jordan Catalano."  

She was right. I hadn't realized what I was doing until my best friend named it. I was talking about him with a similar hopeful vagueness as My So-Called Life's Angela Chase, filling in the lacuna of his personality with my desires for what I imagined him to be. Unlike Angela, however, I was old enough to know better than to obsess, old enough to leave well enough alone and enjoy the thrill of a crush. Nevertheless, my emails to my best friend operated as surrogates for the unedited intimacy of Angela diaristic voiceovers. We were privy to that intimacy as viewers of the television show, but in real life that was kind of confidentiality reserved for a private diary entry or clandestine conversations with your best friend. My crush - as deeply felt as it may have been at the time - was more importantly a conduit for the conversations with my best friend about our internal lives.  

I'm put in mind of Andi Zeisler's argument that pop culture offers us a shared language. She explains, "When we look at our lives - both personally and collectively - we view them largely through the lens of popular culture, using songs, slogans, ad jingles, and television shows as shorthand for what happened at the time and how we experienced it."1 My So-Called Life was a shorthand that really was less for me a way for me to understand and identify the unspoken-but-obvious object of my affection but instead offered a shared language that more intimately identified the relationship that my best friend and I had as young adults and how we remained connected even as our daily narratives changed and geography separated us. The distance between us and the uncertainty of post-college life created a frame where many of our most joyful conversations resembled those we'd had in middle and high school where, under the watchful eye of our parents, most of our communication took place in passed notes written in codes and telephone calls. Now, as a result of physical distance, our conversations returned to their original form, albeit shared electronically in the privacy of our own homes.  

The continuing impact of this shorthand on the self-actualization of its fanbase offers a way to contextualize the brilliance and lasting resonance of what Winnie Holzman accomplished in only 19 episodes of My So-Called Life. My So-Called Life was praised by critics and audiences alike for its dynamic, introspective, and complicated portrayals of high schoolers and their parents fumbling toward adulthood. The abrupt cancellation of the series in 1995 after only one season was, for many Generation Xers and Millennials, our first experience with the fickleness of media production leading to unsatisfyingly unresolved plotlines. The show was formative in structure, content, and impact both while on the air and in its afterlives. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn explains, "My So-Called Life's fans believed they came alive through Angela. They invested deeply in the series, using it to experiment with their own identities and their ambivalence toward encroaching womanhood."2 Watching this show as a preteen, my identification with Angela made sense - she lived inside her head and I, slightly younger than her and with nowhere to go without parental supervision anyway, did too. As an adult I still live a lot of my life in my head as I imagine Angela Chase would have if the show continued into her adulthood.  

In soliciting essays for this cluster, I asked contributors to merge the theoretical with the practical to consider the lasting importance of this show, and to consider its place in the zeitgeist 30 years after its cancellation. These essays demonstrate a breadth of methodologies and entry points. Nicholas E. Miller explores Rickie's iconic dance moves as a both affect and resistance, examining what wrested moments of freedom the character had as one of the few queer people of color on television. Steven Gravatt and Elisha Cohn discuss Jordan Catalano, with Gravatt merging the personal and theoretical in a discussion of Jordan Catalano's function as an object of the female gaze and the impact of Catalano's desirability on male self-construction in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Cohn looks at the character through the lens of Angela's implicit romanticization of dyslexia, highlighting the shows potential ambivalence toward labels in general.  

Olivia Stowell and Corey McEleney appraise the language with which the show has been described; Stowell analyzes the concepts of authenticity and realism within the permeable genre of the teen drama while McEleney identifies the complexities and distinctions between (over)analysis and introspection as modes by which love itself is made strange and, ultimately, worthy of deeper consideration. Elana Levine likewise reminds us of the revolutionary literariness of the show as she looks into the voice-forward writing of Winnie Holzman in her oeuvre. Mythri Jegathesan renders a starkly moving portrait of adolescence as a child of Sri Lankan immigrants against the backdrop of the coming-of-age and a retrospective sympathetic view of parents, the dreams they have for their children, and their attempts to protect their children from real and imagined dangers.  

This cluster is a collective engagement, what I am calling an introspective retrospective, as the contributors think through life then and now as many of us who watched the show in the 1990s are now older than Angela's parents, Patty and Graham.   

The world of Angela Chase and her friends is 30 years in the past; we are somewhere else now. We cannot return to Liberty High or the warmth of Chase house. For viewers who initially watched the series as teens and tweens and are now in middle age, the dopamine of nostalgia is tinged with the melancholy of the reality of the present. This cluster is a small offering of critical hagiography, echoing Angela's own thought that "Sometimes someone says something really small, and it just fits right into this empty place in your heart."3 For those of us in this cluster, My So-Called Life is that "something really small" - a single perfect season - that was foundational in our understanding of self. For many of us, it still is.  

---

Danielle Fuentes Morgan (@dfmorgan.bsky.social) is an associate professor of English and Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University and the associate director of the SCU Center for the Arts and Humanities. She is the author of Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (University of Illinois Press, 2020) as well as a variety of journal articles, book chapters, and essays on African American humor and satire, twentieth and twenty-first century literature, and popular culture. Currently, she is working on a new book titled The Limits of Laughter: Black Millennials and the New Pop Culture, under contract with Columbia University Press. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies with Brittney Michelle Edmonds.

---

References

1. Andi Zeisler, Feminism and Pop Culture (Seal Press, 2008), 4.[⤒]
2. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen (University of Texas Press, 2011), 164.[⤒]
3. My So-Called Life, season 1, episode 13, "Pressure," directed by Mark Pizanarski, written by Winnie Holzman and Ellen Herman, featuring Claire Danes, aired Dec. 1, 1994, ABC.[⤒]

Past clusters