My So-Called Life creator reveals she used to watch Loveline to hear how real teenagers talked

This week marked the 30th anniversary of the premiere of My So-Called Life, ABC’s groundbreaking drama series about the life of perfectly normal teenager Angela Chase (Claire Danes), as she worked her way through the perfectly normal misery of trying to be an extant human being in American high school in the 1990s. As is natural for a show that was formative for so many people, MSCL has had a number of retrospectives written about it over the years, most notably an oral history that ran in Elle back in 2016. Still, it’s always interesting to hear about the genesis of the show, which was so unlike so much teen-focused TV of its era—especially when it’s coming from creator Winnie Holzman, whose knack for writing teens was so good that she had (per a recent interview with Vulture) cast members who’d never met her asking if she was, herself, a teen. Her secret? Loveline.

Okay, not entirely. But in that same Vulture interview, Holzman is asked how she nailed the cadence of writing teen characters when she herself was 20 years removed from high school, having started working on the show when she was 39. “Do you remember Loveline?” Holzman asks. (Yes; emphatically yes—which might explain why we’re also fascinated by interviews about My So-Called Life.) “There was this show with that guy, Dr. Drew Pinsky was his name, and there were a lot of young people on it. I guess some of them might have been in their 20s, but there were teens calling in, asking questions about sex and love. I listened to that sometimes. I’m not saying I stole from that, but it would get me in the mood, and it would assure me that, in other words, life isn’t just special for teens.”

Holzman—whose more recent credits include working on the script for the upcoming Wicked movies—notes that she pulled dialogue from everywhere in life, not just confused teenagers turning to Adam Carolla for sex help. She also goes out of her way to call out basically every member of her cast for their greatness, lauding a little praise on each. (It’s an especially great interview for fans of Wilson Cruz’s Ricky: Talking about the character, Holzman notes that, “I had recently seen a documentary called Paris Is Burning, and it really hit me hard. The young men in that documentary were so beautiful, they had so much life, such life force, and it seemed like they worshiped beauty. That’s what I wanted Ricky to be: somebody who had a strong life force and worshiped beauty.”)