As I may have mentioned, I usually wake up stupidly early. It’s not a bad thing, as I can surf the web, drink lots of coffee, and hang out with the cats. It also familiarizes me with some delightfully mixed television.
A while back, it was Friday the 13th: The Series, which was hypnotically terrible. Then it was an old favorite, Daria. Back when Cartoon Network still ran such thing, I always liked those weeks when Boomerang would feature wonderfully horrible old Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Birdman and The Herculoids.
Lately, it’s been My So-Called Life. I remember watching part of the first episode when the series was originally broadcast. It made me extremely nervous, and I intensely disliked mope-y protagonist Angela Chase. (In fairness, she probably reminded me too much of my own alienated posturing in high school.)
I’m still not crazy about Angela, though I think Claire Danes is pretty amazing. But I’m deeply, deeply smitten with Sharon Cherski, the seemingly nice, normal friend Angela dumps for messed-up Rayanne and sweet Rickie. She could have been just awful: the rigid, conformist proto-princess that Angela wisely shed in favor of her circle of damaged woodland sprites.
But Sharon, as played by Devon Odessa, is awesome (at least to me). She may have a jock boyfriend, she may be a little too invested in yearbook, but she has Angela’s number memorized. In a show where almost everyone is dedicated to propping up Angela’s morose infallibility, Sharon views Angela with frank bafflement and even pity.
That’s kind of hilarious, and it’s also strangely moving. Sharon has no idea what she did to make her lifelong friend cut her loose, and she never quite loses the sting of that betrayal. Sharon doesn’t move on so much as she gives up, trying to deal with the notion that Angela has changed materially or, worse, was never the person Sharon believed her to be. They’re smaller moments than Angela mooning over Jordan Catalano or gazing into her own navel, but I like those moments loads more because they’re spiky and specific.
And I never like A.J. Langer’s Rayanne better than in her scenes with Sharon. Rayanne is a bottomless pit of need shrouded in bohemian artifice; Sharon is grounded, pragmatic, and flinty in that over-achiever kind of way. They’re opposites who don’t quite attract, but they spark. I always prefer relationships that start from a point of mutual antagonism, and this isn’t an exception.
As Sharon circles around the lead misfits, torn between disapproval and fascination, she reminds me strongly of Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I always loved Cordelia for many of the same reasons I’m partial to Sharon. Both deflate the certainty and self-involvement of their shows’ protagonists.
Cordelia is generally more successful, as her targets are marginally less self-obsessed than Angela. Then again, they’d almost have to be. Also, Cordelia is specifically trying to deflate them, while Sharon’s approach seems more anthropological or deductive.
I like to credit the creators with wanting me to like and sympathize with both young women. I know a lot of people don’t, particularly in Cordelia’s case, but I think both Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life) and Joss Whedon (Buffy) liked them a lot. I think that because both got to be right a lot more often than the lead characters.
Say what you will about Cordelia’s approach, her tactlessness, even her cruelty, she had an uncanny ability to think clearly and make cogent observations. Sharon may have often seemed like she was talking to a jumper on a window ledge, a weird mix of patronizing caution and self-righteousness, but she almost always had a point. These are the best kind of spoiler characters, to my way of thinking. (And Cordelia even has the ideal literary namesake for her worldview that “Tact is just not saying true stuff. I’ll pass.”)