Were you a My So-Called Life fan?
I wasn’t a fan, I thought I was Angela Chase. I spent two years trying to dye my hair that exact shade of red. I was pretty sure I had a Rayanne, and a Brian, and a Sharon. Red Land didn’t offer much room for Rickys (Rickies?). In retrospect, of course, I see that my Rayanne was another middle-class child, and her mother was always home. I had many Jordan Catalanos, but none of them were ever, you know, mine.
Perhaps my Jordan Catalano came later, after the show had been cancelled, and I no longer sought MSCL analogues in every corner of my own so-called life. I wonder now why I didn’t view the cancellation as some great cosmic statement, some justification of my angst, that I really was so alienated from the world that it would see fit to cancel the one show that accurately portrayed what I at least imagined my interior life was like. Instead of thinking about that, I downloaded every picture of Claire Danes I could find on the then-fledgling internet, and papered the window in my bedroom with her face. Well, her and Adam Duritz.
ABC has finally released My So-Called Life on DVD. In perhaps the most brilliant marketing move ever, they also made the pilot available on their website.
Studies must show that we who lived through our teenage angst in the mid-nineties now have some sort of significant buying power, because the Counting Crows have also re-released August and Everything After. But that one didn’t make my Christmas list. I’ve been listening to it all along.