Ultimately, a show lives and dies on the strength of its characters. Sure, Martin Scorsese can make movies about unlikable, unsympathetic, or dangerously unbalanced characters and get away with it, but we only have to spend two to three hours with those people. With a TV show, we're going to invest a lot more time, even if the show is cancelled prematurely. So the characters, no matter how interesting, have to have some appeal. (That's why Tony Soprano is beginning to overstay his welcome; any appeal the character had is slowly being overshadowed by his repulsiveness.) And that, for me, is So-Called's greatest flaw. The characters on Freaks were likeable, even charming. But on So-Called, they were sometimes hard to take. I found Angela to be self-absorbed, petulant, and selfish; Rayanne was tiresomely irresponsible and self-consciously "free-spirited"; Sharon was shrill and whiny. But the biggest disaster was Jordan. No matter how good-looking this guy was, his brooding mysteriousness was quickly revealed to be shallowness and...well, sheer stupidity. His appeal, to anybody, let alone Angela, was completely lost on me. Somebody could argue that adjectives like self-absorbed, irresponsible, and shallow describe a lot of teenagers perfectly. But maybe that was the ultimate problem with My So-Called Life: it was too realistic. After all, some of us would never willingly spend time with real teenagers.

ADDENDUM: The one area where So-Called really did have the edge on Freaks was in gender. Although Freaks featured a female as the main character, the other six characters were male. (A second female, Kim, quickly became an unofficial regular.) But more important than the number of males or females on the shows were the nuances afforded to each gender. So-Called presented the femaleness of its characters better. Sharon's and Rayanne's concern over which one was Angela's best friend was just one example of a well-presented concern girls have (or at least one that girls are more open to admit). So-Called may have had been more successful in its subtle portrayal of females due to 14 of its 19 episodes having being written by wom