'It was the James Dean of TV series': Writer Winnie Holzman on her pioneering teen show My So-Called Life

In 1994, a new drama about high school girl Angela Chase launched the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto – and depicted adolescence with an authenticity never seen before on the small screen. Its creator reflects on how it earned its place in TV history.

The upcoming two-part big screen adaptation of the smash-hit Broadway musical Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire's Wizard of Oz prequel, is one of the most hotly anticipated film events of the autumn. For all the dazzle and spectacle of the stage show, Wicked is at heart a warm and layered portrait of an unlikely friendship between two young witches.

For writer Winnie Holzman, who co-created the musical with composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, this was far from uncharted territory. Before Wicked went stratospheric, Holzman created another iconic portrait of female adolescence – one of the most beloved and enduring teen dramas of the 1990s. 

Despite running for just 19 episodes in 1994-95, My So-Called Life had an outsize impact. It launched the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto and encouraged a generation of teenage girls to dye their hair red.

The show followed the exploits of Angela Chase, a 15-year-old high school student living in a fictional suburb of Pittsburgh. Angela was smart, awkward, and at times maddeningly self-involved, a girl in the process of trying to figure out who she was; in other words a typical teenager. The world she inhabited felt miles away from the gleaming teens of the then-popular Beverly Hills 90210, or the more down-to-earth British school drama Grange Hill, and was written in a way that feels remarkably authentic.

Holzman has a theatre background. After graduating from Princeton, she studied Musical Theatre Writing at New York University and has written several plays. (Her 2015 play Choice was recently revived at the McCarter Theater in Princeton.) She honed her craft as a staff writer for Thirtysomething, the groundbreaking 1980s ABC show about the lives of a group of baby-boomers in Philadelphia, co-created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. Holzman joined the show midway through its four-season run: it was her favourite show at the time, "so it was my dream job," she tells the BBC. "It was a training ground for me. It was like my version of being in film school – only I was being paid!" Once Herskovitz and Zwick knew the show was going to end, they approached Holzman with a new project for ABC, one which she would create, and they would executive produce. 

Herskovitz and Zwick had cut their teeth on popular ABC show Family but had always felt the character of the teenage daughter was underserved. "She was never allowed to do anything the least bit subversive or rebellious, or normal for a teen. It left them with a desire to put a real teenager on screen." Holzman, who was 39 at this point, with a young daughter, wasn't initially convinced the project was for her. "Teens weren't really on my radar," she says. She remembers driving home from one of their meetings "saying to myself, well, that's an okay subject until we get a real idea." She wondered if the life of a teenage girl was enough to sustain a show. "Maybe there was a part of me so inculcated in our misogynistic culture that was feeling like 'that's not enough'," she says.

Zwick and Herskovitz, however, felt certain she was right for the job. "Sometimes people see things in you that you don't even see yet in yourself," she says. "Because it was such a great subject for me. But I really don't think, if left to my own devices, I would have come up with it."

My So-Called Life premiered on ABC on 25 August 1994. Right from the start it places the audience firmly in Angela's world through her voiceover. The show, says Holzman, took her "as seriously as any adult character by giving her respect and depth and really exploring her in every way". 

The opening episode sees Angela dyeing her hair fire engine red, much to her parents' dismay, and being admonished during English class for musing that Anne Frank maybe didn't have it so bad, being cooped up in an attic with a boy she fancied. "Like many adolescents, she – and the series – can be off-putting at first, but it doesn't take long to develop a deep attachment to her," wrote Variety at the time, before declaring the show looked to be "a critical hit and has the makings of a ratings contender".

At the show's beginning, Angela is engineering distance from her childhood friend Sharon and instead hanging out with new friends, Rayanne (AJ Langer) – "who was dangerous and edgy and not quite trustworthy, but at the same time, a lot of fun," says Holzman – and Rickie (Wilson Cruz), who was figuring out his sexuality. The show depicted the intensity and complexity of teenage friendship. "Who you align yourself with in high school is a lot of what your identity is," says Holzman. "That sounds kind of obvious, but I wasn't sure it had ever been depicted on TV."

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The main thread of the series was Angela's tentative relationship with Leto's monosyllabic Jordan Catalano, with his piercing eyes and curtain haircut, whose appeal lies predominantly in the way he slouches moodily against his locker. ("I like how he's always leaning," sighs Angela.) At the same time, she remains blithely unaware that her friend Brian (Devon Gummersall) harbours feelings for her.

So much of the show's success is down to Danes, who is phenomenally assured in the role. Holzman initially worried they wouldn’t be able to find the right girl to carry the show. They turned to Linda Lowy, who now casts many of Shonda Rhimes' shows. "She said there's this girl in New York you need to see." Danes was just 13, though Angela was written as 15, but Lowy was right. "We never looked at anybody else after we met Claire," says Holzman. In a 2019 conversation about the show with Cruz for Variety, Danes explained how Angela's insecurity mirrored her own. "I was in so much pain. I don't think I've ever been in more pain in my life. That's a very challenging age, especially for girls. I had just gone through junior high school. I felt bludgeoned, navigating my way through those social gymnastics. I was so bad at it." She also praised Holzman's writing: "She said everything that I wanted in my heart but didn't have the means of articulating."

The casting of Rickie was also key. Holzman had envisioned the character as half-Latino, half-black, with an androgynous quality. When they found Cruz, he was just perfect for the part. "Not to sound too much like I live in California, but I do think he was fated to play that part," she laughs. "There was just a rightness to him."

The character was inspired, in part, by Holzman's experience of theatre when she was younger. She’d encountered a lot of gay men while doing summer seasons and it made sense to her to include a gay character in Angela's friendship group, even if, at the start of the series, she says, "he wasn't even self-identifying as gay yet". All of the characters, she says, "were in a state of flux, trying to understand who they were – and that even applied to the grown-ups". 

Depictions of gay people on TV were still a rarity at the time – Thirtysomething saw some of its advertisers pull out because of its gay characters. Yet Rickie's sexuality is not treated as a big deal, but just woven into the story. We first see him applying eyeliner in the girls' bathroom. It's only towards the end of the run that he's comfortable enough in his own skin to bust out some moves at the school dance with new student Delia, who accompanies him as his date – a delightful scene of self-acceptance and queer joy – and only in the last episode does he come out to Delia as gay.

For many young people, watching it was the first time they'd seen themselves represented on screen. For some it was a catalyst to coming out, says Holzman, while for others it opened conversation around sexuality. For some, "just watching it alone was empowering for them," she says. "That makes me feel very, very happy."

Danes' age meant that they were limited in the number of hours they could use her. "I was so in awe of Claire, that I would have put her in every scene, but this ended up being a very creatively stimulating problem to have," says Holzman. It meant she had to give more space to other characters, which took them in interesting directions – see the growing warmth between Sharon and Rayanne (the effervescent Langer, who went on to marry a British aristocrat and become the Countess of Devon) or the way an understanding develops between Brian and Jordan. As the series went on, Holzman gave the characters unexpected layers and showed how even Angela's parents, Patty and Graham, are still struggling to figure stuff out.  

The show was officially cancelled on 15 May 1995, despite being critically praised and much loved by fans, because as it turned out, sadly, those ratings were not good enough. In the finale, Brian accidentally reveals his feelings to Angela, and is left standing in the street with his bike as she drives away with Jordan. If they had been given a second season, Holzman says she had in mind some future storylines. Sharon would have become pregnant, Angela's parents would have got divorced, sending Patty into a deep depression, and the Angela/Jordan/Brian relationship would have become even more complicated. 

Its devoted fans mounted what would be the first ever coordinated online campaign to save the show, Operation Life Support, bombarding ABC with thousands of letters. Though the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, love for the show did not dissipate. Perhaps because it only ran for a single season, it has come to be regarded as a cult classic, and still features on critics’ best-of lists. In 2007 it was cited as one of Time magazine's greatest shows of all time.

My So-Called Life also set the tone for other shows that took teens and their anxieties seriously and spoke to them on their level. It paved the way for ratings behemoths like Dawson's Creek and set both Danes, with whom Holzman remains close, and Leto on the road to film stardom.  

Even though its cancellation came as a disappointment, Holzman says she didn't feel all that bad about it because she was confident that they had made something meaningful, something of which they could really be proud. "The knowledge that you put something out there that helped people feel less alone, and maybe a little uplifted, or seen is more important than how many episodes we got to make," she says. "You always want to feel like you've done your best, like you really put your ass on the line, and that's how I felt. I felt like I put it all out there." Herskovitz calls it "the James Dean of TV series," she says, laughing, "and I thought there was something true about that. It died young, but it made a big impact."  

My So-Called Life is available to stream on Hulu and to buy on Prime Video and Apple TV+ in the US

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