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Nothing on TV Felt Like My So-Called Life
Winnie Holzman reflects on writing the pilot more than 30 years ago: “Every character was trying to figure out who they were.”
When it premiered on August 25, 1994, the ABC drama introduced Angela, played by then-unknown Claire Danes, as smart, self-aware, anxiety-ridden, and, like every other character on the series, very much a work in progress. So aware of her own imperfections that the knowledge often paralyzed her, Angela’s unreliable narration chronicled the events of the series in naturalistic stream-of-consciousness credibly sprinkled with placeholder words (“like” and “or something” were favorites). He was just on Oprah’s show, it was the highest rated Oprah show ever on your network, and Michael Jackson fully wears eyeliner, and America loves him, and also, there was a movie this year, which you will be very familiar with, because it had a transgender person in a leading role, called The Crying Game, and the actor who played the transgender person in The Crying Game got nominated for an Oscar, and America embraced that movie, and that all means these things you’re worried about are already embraced by the public.”
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