🎧 Tales From the ’90s: Before 'Wicked', Winnie Holzman's ‘My So-Called Life’ Shook TV
Richard Rushfield talks to today's hit writer about her earlier smash: An iconic show that spawned new stars, genres and anxiety at ABC
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Richard Rushfield sits down with Winnie Holzman, creator of the beloved but short-lived teen drama My So-Called Life, which ran for one 19-episode season from 1994-95 and later became a cross-generational cult hit. The show that launched Claire Danes and Jared Leto also captured adolescent angst onscreen in a totally new way — “School is a battlefield for your heart,” anyone? — that made ABC execs “deeply nervous,” says Holzman, though she was fiercely protected by her EPs and mentors, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. A student of poetry and the Stanislavski system, Holzman, in a candid, hilarious and nostalgic conversation, unpacks the emotion and humor that propelled her through multiple 1990s TV successes to the Broadway hit Wicked (she wrote the book of the musical) and its two-part film adaptation, whose first installment is in the Oscar hunt. “The more writing you do, the better you get to be as a writer,” she says. “You have to find an inner resilience, because you get a lot of rejection. So what are you going to do with that?”
