Claire Danes

That wasn’t special effects in Stardust, that was just Claire Danes.

—my best friend

Angela Chase is a couple of years younger than I am, but we’re close enough in age that I identified with her strongly. She was the centerpiece of My So-Called Life, the best new show of the 1994-1995 season. ER? Friends? The Secret World of Alex Mack? Not as good as my beloved and short-lived My So-Called Life. Angela remains to this day one of the most believable teenagers in TV history, the cornerstone of a show that felt like it understood both high school students and their parents in a way very few have understood either. And in many ways it all starts with the casting of Claire Danes.

Danes was just shy of her fourteenth birthday when she filmed the pilot episode of a series that would take a year and a half to sell. She was still young enough when the show went to series that the episodes could not focus solely on the character of Angela Chase. The laws about filming prevented it. This meant that episodes were written so as to develop not just the kids but also Angela’s parents—and even various of the other adults on the show. It gave the show a depth that you couldn’t get from just one perspective.

But even in her limited time, Angela was one of us. We watched her and understood her. She loved that idiot who shall remain nameless even though she was too good for him. She made new friends and was hurt by them. She hurt old friends. She loved her parents and hated them and wanted to be free of them and needed them. She bickered with her younger sister and tried to be far more adult than she was. Angela Chase was a teenager, Gods love her, for good and for ill.

In the years since the cancellation that broke my heart, Danes has done lots of other things. Some of them have been better than others. She was a spectacular Juliet, in part because she was about the right age and in part because she was luminous. You can believe that someone would fall in love with her at first sight. Similarly, you can believe that she was a fallen star. I didn’t like To Gillian on Her 37^th Birthday (which I watched on my own 37^th birthday), but it wasn’t because of her performance, which was a delight as always.

In my mind, Angela did grow up. She stopped chasing her stupid high school boyfriend—and maybe she didn’t end up with the guy who also loved her, but so few people end up with high school loves that it doesn’t really matter. I like to think that she would sometimes look back on those years and kick herself for how she acted, but don’t we all? Maybe she let herself be as smart as she actually was. Maybe she took over the family business. I hope she stopped worrying as much about how people saw her and cared more about who she was. The way so many of us did.