'It was the James Dean of TV series': Writer Winnie Holzman on her pioneering teen show My So-Called Life
BBC'It was the James Dean of TV series': Writer Winnie Holzman on her pioneering teen show My So-Called Life Emmanuel Lafont/ Showtime In 1994, a new drama about high school girl Angela Chase launched the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto – and depicted adolescence with an authenticity never seen before on the small screen. The show, says Holzman, took her "as seriously as any adult character by giving her respect and depth and really exploring her in every way". Getty Images AJ Langer and Wilson Cruz provided a lot of energy and humour as Angela's new friends Rayanne and Rickie At the show's beginning, Angela is engineering distance from her childhood friend Sharon and instead hanging out with new friends, Rayanne – "who was dangerous and edgy and not quite trustworthy, but at the same time, a lot of fun," says Holzman – and Rickie, who was figuring out his sexuality. She’d encountered a lot of gay men while doing summer seasons and it made sense to her to include a gay character in Angela's friendship group, even if, at the start of the series, she says, "he wasn't even self-identifying as gay yet".
