#My so called life tv

For the soundtrack recording see My So-Called Life (Music from the Television Series). Some are featured as soundtrack, some are part of the story (such as heard on a radio) and some are sung by the characters themselves. Coming to terms with his love for makeup and preference for female friends, he makes it clear, “I don’t want to be a girl, I just want to hang with the girls.” Still from ‘My So-Called Life.There are many songs and pieces of music used in My So-Called Life. He was never written as a caricature and was able to explore his sexual identity at his own pace.

Just like real life, they are constant threads that flowed with the overall narrative and didn’t propel the story forward as a “special episode” so common in teen shows of the ’80s and ’90s.Īs a secondary character, the writers treated Ricky’s storyline the same way it treated the main characters’, with a mosaic of thought and emotion. Never really feeling 100 percent comfortable in his own skin, Ricky confides in a friend, “You blend in, unlike me, who basically never will.” Ricky’s family, school, and emotional dilemmas were never neatly wrapped up at the end of an episode. Ricky was never written as a character he was able to explore his sexual identity at his own pace. We learn – after his English teacher asks him what Rickie is short for – that his real name is Enrique. He lived with an aunt and uncle who were emotionally and physically abusive, he was made to feel alienated in the girl’s bathroom in which he sought solace, and he had to find some semblance of normalcy after his family moved away without telling him. Throughout 19 episodes, we followed Rickie as he worked his way through the emotional complexities that come with being gay in predominantly straight surroundings. The scene is so casual in that it doesn’t shine a spotlight on Rickie’s sexual identity, but rather, empathetically weaves it into the larger storyline. Langer) dissect every move that heartthrob Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) makes, Rickie is out of focus in the background meticulously applying eyeliner, indicating that it’s not the first time he’s slayed a smokey eye. In the pilot episode, we’re introduced to Rickie Vasquez in the girl’s bathroom as he’s rummaging through his best friend’s backpack in search of eyeliner. In a voice-over, she describes high school as “a battlefield, for your heart,” and throughout the course of the show, the writers captured the complexities of teen angst and self-identity. As the show’s protagonist, Danes perfectly captured the isolation and confusion of growing into one’s own. The teen drama followed Angela Chase (Claire Danes) and her group of friends at the fictional Liberty High school. More than 20 years later, Wilson Cruz’s portrayal of Rickie remains relevant, highlighting how ahead of its time the character was for a ‘90s audience.

#My so called life tv

Long before Will & Grace normalized the LGBTQ community for TV audiences, Winnie Holzman’s one-season drama, My So-Called Life gave us Rickie Vasquez, a perfectly coiffed gay teenage boy who had a love for bold patterns and dark eyeliner.