There was a great article in the New York Times this morning celebrating the release of My So-Called Life on DVD this Tuesday. Some good excerpts from the review:
"To claim that My So-Called Life is great, watershed television is to say something so firmly ingrained in the conventional wisdom that it hardly bears repeating. The series brought us the experience of adolescence outside the bounds of artifice, peril and pathology that had provided the context for nearly every other depiction of teenagers on television....
Television gives us teenage lust exercised or teenage lust repressed but rarely does it evoke the way young people translate their carnal urges into something they understand as a deeper abiding affection. My So-Called Life is essentially a study of a young mind processing desire into something less terrifying and more easily justified — substantiating it with false hopes — and in that regard it is more than a good TV show, it is a good TV show that attains the dimension and complexity of literature. The great postwar novels of adolescence deal with innocence lost; My So-Called Life deals with innocence sustained, but it offers a no-less-illuminating view of what it is to be young because of it....
My So-Called Life appeared only 13 years ago but leaves one feeling nostalgic for a time when teenagers still communicated with pauses and half-thoughts, and were not perceived solely as an amalgam of their accomplishments....
As the touchstone examination of adolescence in the ’90s, My So-Called Life rejected the Clintonian ethos of ambition: striving, perhaps, wasn’t better. And at the same time it linked itself closely to the feminism of the period, one that prized interiority, self-help and revolutions from within. It was a diluted notion of female advancement, but at least it was a modestly dressed one. Angela wore late-grunge-era flannels and baggy shapes. So there is another way, finally, that My So-Called Life looks like no other teenage series that succeeded it: We never saw our heroine’s bellybutton."
The article offers very high praise, but that praise is wholeheartedly deserved. Kudos to Claire Danes, Winnie Holzman, Ed Zwick, Marshall Hershkovitz, and the entire creative team behind the show for putting together such a superb example of how wonderful a television program can be.
I had a good weekend at home, despite the bad weather. Joy, Kelly, and I had a roommate reunion in Princeton; we missed Michelle, but we got to catch up with each other and I loved getting to see them. Kim dragged me and Betsy shopping for her Halloween costume. I haven't been feeling great lately, so I did some relaxing. I didn't get enough work done. The marking period ends on Wednesday, and it really snuck up on me. I have work to grade and grades to organize and calculate, and there's just not enough time. I'm not excited about going back to school tomorrow.
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