My So-Called Life Renewed

When My So-Called Life aired on ABC in the fall of 1994, I was enduring my senior year of high school, and so I was just slightly older than the main characters, who feel like real people to me even though I know that actors played them. It was a very sensitive, quiet sort of show, and written in such a way by creator Winnie Holzman that the behavior of the characters often gradually revealed a kind of pattern, which was a staple of 1990s storytelling. I watched the series as it aired, and I also gorged on it in the late 1990s when MTV would seem to air episodes several times a day every day.

My So-Called Life is a snow globe of its time, all plaid flannel shirts and extravagant emotional navel-gazing, and it was gone too soon, barely able to eke out a season’s worth of episodes (19 in total) over the time it was allowed to shoot. This was before mass school shootings. This was also before the gender experimentation of Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) could be treated as a matter of course, as it would be today, and had to be very carefully handled.

The series ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, with Claire Danes’s protagonist Angela Chase realizing that Brian Krakow (Devon Gummersall) is in love with her. To my eyes now, the nerdy Krakow looks just as beautiful as Angela’s obsessive crush object Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto), and far more suited to Angela, who is experimenting with the “bad influence” of her friend Rayanne Graff (A.J. Langer). Brian just needs a haircut.

What happens after the end of the last episode of My So-Called Life? Holzman has said that she intended the troubled marriage of Angela’s parents Patty (Bess Armstrong) and Graham (Tom Irwin) to end and for the tense and controlling Patty to fall into a serious depression, and so in the second season Angela would have been forced to accept a lot of responsibility for keeping their home going. Angela’s former best friend Sharon (Devon Odessa) would have gotten pregnant in this second season, and it would have been discovered that the teacher who was sheltering Rickie Vasquez was gay, and both of these plot lines would likely have led to some major drama, which was never a forte for this particular show; getting a pimple was a better basis for a first-rate My So-Called Life episode. Holzman understood that adolescence is a time when small things seem intensely large and life-endingly humiliating.

One thing that stands out to me now, in thinking about what might happen to these beloved characters, is that the public high school setting allowed Holzman to treat social class in a very specific way. Angela is a good student type from a “good” home, even if that home is about to be destroyed. That brings with it certain expectations for behavior and achievement, and as a 15-year-old she is naturally rebelling against that, for now; once high school is over, things will change.

Surely Angela is expected to go to college, just as Brian is, whereas Rayanne and Jordan could easily take the drink and drugs route, and if they survive that they will be working low-income jobs. Which means that Angela and Brian are not at all likely to be interacting with Rayanne and Jordan as adults. Rickie will likely make his way to New York as soon as possible (Cruz has imagined him attending the FIT fashion school), and he’ll start having fun and will have many more choices for himself as a late 1990s Chelsea boy.

So here’s my third season or prospective TV movie: My So-Called Life: 2024, 30 years later. It seems very clear to me that Brian Krakow is going to become a tech millionaire in the 21st century, but his personal life will always take second place to his career because he will always still be pining for Angela Chase. I think Angela and Brian finally had a big fight somewhere in the 2000s where he confronted her about always using him, and Angela felt the truth of what he was telling her, and she felt very bad about this to a self-loathing degree.

I think Angela eventually seeks to make a marriage that is the opposite of the marriage of her parents, which means that she finds herself a man who is very steady and high-earning and has children with him. She has a degree in psychology, but she only works part-time; she can’t quite commit herself to anything. Does she try to write? Yes. Keep a journal? She fills them, there are many. But no one has ever wanted to publish them, and she has given up hope on that. She loves her husband and is enthused about him at first, but by her forties she knows that something is missing from her life. Her eldest daughter is now around the same age that Angela was in the pilot episode of My So-Called Life, and this daughter sees all her mother’s flaws and mercilessly criticizes her and her 1990s solipsism, to a sadistic degree. Angela is buffeted by hate from her oldest child and neglected by her busy husband. She longs to be adored again.

Maybe a very dissatisfied middle-aged Angela reaches out to Brian Krakow in 2024. He isn’t easy to get to, but she sends out a signal somehow, and he is in just the right frame of mind to see her SOS and respond to it passionately and forgive her the past. They begin to have a romantic affair the likes of which neither has ever experienced before. It’s like the 1990s all over again, but this time for real! Her marriage ends. She needs to do this, to try this, with Krakow. The husband is stony, but he understands. He knows the woman he married; he knows she is a romantic, and self-absorbed. Her eldest daughter feels righteously confirmed in all her condemnations of her mother.

Does it work, this renewed relationship between Angela Chase and Brian Krakow when they are in their forties? Yes, it does. There are some rocky moments, but they’re older now. They know what they want. They want each other. Maybe call it Angela and Brian, to get away from the high school “first name last name” style of the original show. A few scenes for an elderly Patty and Graham would be nice; maybe Graham even asks Patty for money?

We should see lots of a middle-aged Rickie Vasquez in New York, too, and his own sexual and romantic life can be portrayed as very active and elaborate. Maybe he had some bad early relationships and he is more able to stand up for himself now. Does he live in a ménage à trois of some kind? I think Rickie is old enough to remember being a near-total outcast, and so he is somewhat suspicious of gay assimilation and mimicking heterosexual conventions. And maybe we can even get a glimpse or two of Rayanne.

Angela has ignored a Facebook friend request from Rayanne (was Rayanne always asking her for money in their last encounters?), but Angela will have stayed in contact with Rickie; maybe they write each other playful text messages. Rickie still sees Rayanne sometimes, and they knock back some drinks in Hell’s Kitchen occasionally. Jordan is long gone, maybe dead in a car crash, maybe trying to play music somewhere, but even if he is still alive he has no online presence; he is a ghost from 1994 only, with those girlish eyes and the world’s most beautiful nose. Someone like Jordan Catalano knows that being elusive is his best bet. He was practically a memory already in high school.

A.J. Langer married royalty in real life and is now the Countess of Devon. Rayanne Graff, if she is still alive, is tending bar and still whooping it up, maybe in New Jersey somewhere, and with children of her own. She thinks about Angela sometimes. Rayanne loved Angela. But some connections made in a public high school cannot be sustained socially after that enforced experience is over. Rayanne isn’t bitter about Angela not wanting to remain in contact with her. She understands. She wishes Angela well. The love/hate she felt for Angela has mellowed over time.

Rayanne Graff is the character I remember most fondly and love the most from My So-Called Life, yet even I’m sweeping her aside for Angela and Brian, because I’m an Angela/Brian type, not a Rayanne/Jordan type. Still and all, I lift my glass to Rayanne as she tends bar. What would fusspots like us do without the bad influences we long for in that purest time of experimentation, adolescence?

My most intense memory of watching My So-Called Life in its first run is the episode where Rayanne has betrayed Angela by sleeping with Jordan and we see her in a rehearsal for a school play. It was made clear in that moment that Rayanne has lots of potential of her own if she can just iron out that imp of perversity in her, yet without that imp Rayanne wouldn’t be Rayanne. And now I’m starting to sound like an Angela Chase voiceover about the malleability of identity, which was a key theme of the show, which is ironic, since no fictional characters seem quite as real to me as Angela Chase, Rayanne Graff, Jordan Catalano, Brian Krakow, and Rickie Vasquez. They are old friends, and they stay for me fondly and deeply in memory, in amber, in the hallway, in their plaid shirts, which I also wore, longing for a boyfriend just like Rickie does. Angela would be in the position of her mother Patty these days, and of course she would have a marriage-ending affair just as her father Graham did. I’d like to, like, see that.