My So-Called Life (1994)
Film:
DVD:

Created by Winnie Holzman
Starring Claire Danes, A.J. Langer, Wilson Cruz, Bess Armstrong, Tom Irwin

Features:

• All nineteen episodes
  

Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent it.

Angela Chase (Danes) has a problem. It's called being a teenager, and specifically a teenager in high school. Oh yeah, and she has parents and is going through a bit of a mid-teenage-life crisis. She's recently dumped her old friend, Sharon (Devon Odessa), in favor of the much "cooler," more rebellious Rayanne (Langer) and her friend Rickie (Cruz). Of course, Sharon is annoying as three hells, so no one in their right mind can blame her. Then there's the matter of her overbearing mother (Armstrong), barely balancing out her father (Irwin), who's trying to cope with having a teenage woman-child in the house--and barely making it. Then there's the matter of another of her old friends, Brian (Devon Gummersall), who she constantly takes for granted and treats like dung. Wow...sounds...pretty accurate, doesn't it?

That's the strength of this series--that it captures perfectly the angst, the uncertanty, the hormones, and the life destroying crises that make up life in high school. And what's more, it's not just a bunch of kids running around doing things...the parents are involved as well, and you get to see what's going on in their heads. Told primarily from Angela's point of view, it's a very interesting microcosm of teenage life that had kids at the time nodding in appreciation and grown-up kids now looking back with a morbid nostalgia and nodding too.

However, like the series that would come later, Once and Again, there are problems. And they're so small--and yet so sharp--that when they prick you, it's like that terrible feeling you get when your hand's cut with tiny bits of ice. There's no sign of a wound, no blood--but damn, does it hurt. The problem is that the writers are working so hard to keep things real that when they stray off the mark, it's like a kick in the collective groin of the audience, it's so glaring. It's the old slapstick routine of trying to get a fitted sheet that's too small onto a mattress--eventually it's going to snap up and you're screwed. Almost every episode has something in it, something very small, that just flat doesn't work. First example is when Tom Irwin explains to Claire Danes that when his mother is behaving like a tyrant, "But you know that's not the real her..." Gack.

There are exceptions: the "Weekend" episode for example, but it's going for laughs more than anything else. And make no mistake, around the craters of these transgressions are some of the best teenage characters you've ever seen, spouting incredible dialogue. Take for example, from the pilot episode, where Angela is explaining why working on yearbook is a crock. It's no wonder the poor series ended, cancelled, as it did: either viewers were too stupid to understand and grasp what the people behind the show were doing or, as occurred to me while watching it, audiences decided the show was a little too close to home--why tune in to relive what a shitty time you had in high school?

Regardless, the set should be viewed, despite its utter and complete lack of features. Considering the rocky road this underwent to actually hit DVD, fans should be grateful the thing even showed up. And fans of the series will want to go ahead and plonk down the coin, because in one shot they've got the whole series at their disposal. Everyone else should at least rent once.