When “My So-Called Life” premiered on ABC in the fall of 1994, I was a freshman at college and, shockingly, not watching much television. I had heard about the show, but didn’t catch it until I was home for the holidays that year and my younger sister urged me to watch it with her one night.

Looking back on the show now, it’s hard to believe that it ever made it to network television. None of the major broadcast networks cared about younger viewers at the time and they certainly didn’t know how to market to them. Executive Producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick had recently come off of the success of “thirtysomething”, which allowed them to bring this project to ABC and finally get it aired, even though the pilot was filmed a full year before it hit the airwaves in August of ‘94.

“My So-Called Life” may not have pulled in record-breaking ratings, but in just 19 episodes it brought one of the most honest and heartfelt looks at American teenage life ever written into homes across the country. Even though it didn’t last, you have to give ABC credit for having the balls to let the show explore and confront themes including teenage alcoholism, homosexuality, and school violence in prime time.

Like many others, I didn’t really get a chance to see the entire series until it began to run nonstop on MTV. Looking back, you can see how a show like MSCL (for better or worse) tapped into the MTV audience much stronger than ABC’s and it changed the nature of programming on that channel forever.

This new 6-DVD box set collects all 19 episodes along with a wealth of bonus materials, including episode commentaries from members of the cast with creator and head writer Winnie Holzman. Winnie also sits down for a one-on-one interview with Claire Danes on the set’s bonus disc. Damn near every member of the cast also participates in the extra interviews and retrospectives that appear here…all of them except Jared Leto anyway (who is apparently too busy being a major douchebag to recognize that his career would be nowhere without his role as ‘Jordan Catalano!).

It’s also important to note that all of the original music that appeared in the show (which plays as a who’s-who of modern rock radio at the time) is intact on the dvd. That means you’ll hear from the likes of The Afghan Whigs, Juliana Hatfield, Sonic Youth, Buffalo Tom, The Lemonheads, Jawbox, and Bettie Serveert among others while revisiting the show.

Check out a great preview of the Box Set in this fan video…..

We’ve got FIVE copies of the MSCL box to giveaway this week thanks to our friends at Shout! Factory. You have until midnight on Sunday, November 25th to register and we’ll announce our winners on November 26th.

Please include your name, age, and a mailing address where we should ship your box set if you are one of our five winners! One entry per person.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Announcements, Giveaways, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.