My So-Called Life
Nineteen episodes of Angela Chase's unsparing inner monologue — and of Jordan Catalano leaning against things. One season, canceled, and mourned so hard the internet invented the save-our-show campaign for it.
Created by Winnie Holzman and produced by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, My So-Called Life followed teenager Angela Chase — Claire Danes — through Liberty High in a fictional Pittsburgh suburb, narrating adolescence with a precision network TV hadn't attempted: 'School is a battlefield for your heart.' The producers cast actors close in age to their characters in pursuit of a realism critics have cited ever since. It aired on ABC from August 25, 1994, to January 26, 1995.
It never had a chance in the schedule. Slotted Thursdays at 8 p.m. against NBC's Mad About You and a new sitcom called Friends, the series pulled around 10 million weekly viewers — respectable, but a third of what ABC's own Home Improvement drew. The acclaim ran far ahead of the numbers: Danes won the Golden Globe for best actress in a TV drama, and the cast launched Jared Leto — whose Jordan Catalano perfected the art of leaning — and Wilson Cruz.
What happened next made history twice. Fans mounted an online campaign to save the show — the first such effort in the history of the World Wide Web — and it nearly worked: ABC executive Ted Harbert said he was prepared to order a second season. But Danes and her parents told the producers she didn't want to continue under the grueling shooting schedule, and ABC made the cancellation official on May 15, 1995, citing the show's 'far too narrow' appeal. The timing was exquisitely bad — The WB and UPN, networks built on exactly the teen audience ABC couldn't value, had launched mere weeks before the finale aired. 'Networks didn't understand that you could sell to adolescent girls,' Herskovitz said later. Every teen drama since has lived in the space those nineteen episodes opened.
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