DVD

I was just starting my first year of high school when ABC aired
My So-Called Life—set during a turbulent sophomore year at
Pittsburgh’s fictional Liberty High—so I was probably, like,
morally obligated to revere it. What’s surprising, watching the
series again 13 years later, is that it was worth the adoration.

Claire Danes plays Angela, a middle-class, middling student who’s
recently fallen out with her good-girl best friend (Devon Odessa) and
in with the manic, funny, alcoholic Rayanne (A. J. Langer) and her gay
sidekick Rickie (Wilson Cruz). Danes, playing her own age, is
jaw-droppingly good: She has a preternaturally grounded quality
that reins in Angela’s voiceover reveries (“Walking into someone else’s
house for the first time is like entering another country. Not that
I’ve ever been to another country”) and makes the pilot episode’s
parallel between Angela and Anne Frank seem almost justified.
Meanwhile, in an arguably less important triangle, Angela is pursued by
her nerdy next-door neighbor Brian (Devon Gummersall) and pursues the
dreamy Jordan (Jared Leto).

Everyone remembers Jared Leto—he leans so memorably—but I’d somehow forgotten how dim Jordan was
made out to be. “So guess what, ah, there’s a term for me,” he brags to
Angela in the final episode, gearing up for some polysyllabic
fireworks. “I’m a rudimentary reader with low literacy skills.” Oh, and
those famous leans? He’s usually applying Visine. In a giggly
commentary track by Claire Danes and creator Winnie Holzman, Danes
observes: “It was a great romance because it was a forbidden love for
both of them … [Jordan was] from the wrong side of special ed.”

As the show developed, though, the writers gained the confidence to
shift away from Angela’s reliably adorable love life and venture into
riskier territory. The stories involving Rickie, whether he’s
thinking about asking an artsy boy to the school dance (“The Life of
Brian”) or hopping from one friend’s house to another after his father
throws him out (“So-Called Angels”), are some of the most heartrending
stuff I’ve ever seen on television. Yes, Rickie is one of those
tragic gay characters advocacy groups feel compelled to belittle.
But he’s a better signal of the way my generation is changing attitudes
about gay rights than a hundred of Buffy‘s Willows.

I’m still a little crushed there wasn’t a second season.

New to DVD this week: Drunken Angel (Criterion,
$39.95), Our Hitler (Facets, $79.95), Paprika (Sony,
$26.96).