#truly we need to get back to the basics but i fear network execs just see dollar signs and that won’t happen anytime soon

[rotating-hyperfixations]

One of the comments that I’ve started to see pop up on Twitter and TikTok lately was that it’s wildly that Millie Bobby Brown is married and about to play a teenage girl that defeats monsters through the power of friendship; as a dig as to how long it’s taken Netflix to release a five season show. And like, they’re not wrong the show debuted when I was 17 turning 18 and now I have a bachelors degree, masters degree and a full time job. But, for the most part their production delays haven’t been their fault?

Like seasons 1-3 I think had about a year and half between each season, give or take. Then season 4 was set to follow that schedule and COVID hit and shut down film production for over a year, and then when season 5 was set to begin the writers and actors strikes happened which delayed filming again. It’s definitely a problem, how long it takes for studios/streamers to release shows now a days; especially ones that are not heavy VFX or effects shows. But I don’t feel like Stranger Things falls into this category, sure they’ve taken a while to release five seasons worth of content, but for the most part they have tried to have a reasonable turn around time between seasons; they just had bad luck with outside events interfering with production.

TLDR: There is absolutely a problem with the time in between releases of shows now a days, however Stranger Things by all accounts has tried to keep that window short and has just had unfortunate luck and not a good example of it being an egregious amount of time between release dates. Especially given the effects heaviness of the show.

[alexsfictionaddiction]

You Will Be Found

Today marks the start of Mental Health Awareness Week, hosted by the UK charity Mental Health Foundation, who help those living with mental health conditions to live their very best possible lives. 

If you knew me as a BookTuber, then you may know all about my own mental health struggles because I used to talk about them every year on this day. I think this is the first time I’ve done so on this blog, so I will endeavour to fill you all in now. I should preface this by saying that I tell my story because I think it’s probably a common one. I don’t tell it to get sympathy or pity or attention. I tell it because I think a lot of people who feel very alone can relate to it and I tell it to let them know that they’re not on their own in this. 

In January 2013, I was 22, a fresh uni graduate with a good English degree and I was in my first job as Social Media Exec at a tech start-up. I was happy with my long-term boyfriend and I had an amazing set of friends. I was back home living with my parents having been away for uni but of course, that’s not unusual on an entry-level salary. Life was good. On the surface. So I thought. Then one morning, I woke up and I realised that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d truly felt ‘happy’. I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t felt scared, irritable, unenergised and sad. I had a really weird deep sadness that I couldn’t really understand. Nothing had happened to cause it. My life was exactly the same as it had been the last time I was happy, so what on Earth was this? 

Of course, I’d heard of depression before but at that time, I honestly thought it was something that happened to people when they lost someone or something close to them. I didn’t know it could just happen. So when I went to my GP and told her that I didn’t understand why my mood had been so low and why everything was suddenly so scary, she asked me some questions. Questions about how long I’d been feeling like this (about 3-4 weeks), if it affected my daily life and interactions with other people (yes, I was picking arguments over stupid things and crying a lot), if I’d had any suicidal thoughts (I had). And like that, I was diagnosed with both General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Depression. Suddenly two demons had moved into my head and my intense fear and sadness made sense. 

I was prescribed an anti-depressant called Citalopram (which gave me some really crazy dreams -an eight-legged centaur called Ralph was a common visitor to my subconscious) and referred to a CBT counsellor called Sheryl. I was wary of pouring my heart out to a stranger at first but the more I saw her, the easier it became. My chats with Sheryl gave me the space to just talk about whatever came into my mind without worrying about being called weird or stupid, which I had been in the past by people close to me. 

Sadly, I was only given six sessions for free on the NHS. I knew I needed more so Sheryl agreed to keep seeing me but I had to pay her £45 per hour rate. This meant I couldn’t afford to see her every week anymore and so I started seeing her every fortnight. It was still a huge drain on my finances but when I lost my job and my boyfriend within three months, my Depression in particular got worse, so I needed Sheryl more than ever. Basic things like showering, eating regularly, getting out of bed were sometimes impossible and my self-esteem was non-existent. Sheryl gave me coping strategies and thought-reversal exercises to practice whenever I felt a panic attack or thought spiral coming on (some of which worked and I still use today). 

Over the course of around 18 months, with a combination of Sheryl and Citalopram, I gradually began to get better. I was taking care of myself more. I’d discovered yoga, got myself a retail job and feeling a little lighter. Of course on a retail assistant’s salary, I had to stop seeing Sheryl but to be honest, I was pretty much ready to let go. By then, I’d come to the realisation that I probably wouldn’t ever be rid of the demons completely but I had learned to live with them and control them to some extent. 

Now it has been five years since I’ve taken any medication for a mental health condition but I have had more therapy. Two years ago, I took a counselling training course (just for my own interest really) and it included a lot of self-exploration and self-awareness. Each class started with a group therapy session where we were expected to talk about how our week had been and delve into our own mental health struggles. It was through these sessions that I realised just how many seemingly ‘normal’ people are also housing demons. Their demons say the same things, behave in the same way and affect their lives in exactly the same way as mine do. 

Now, I tend to think of Anxiety and Depression as a demon couple who live in my head. They’re fully settled in now and have no plans to move out. Yes, they both still affect me to some degree every single day. Sometimes I can keep them both at a reasonable manageable calm. Sometimes one of them swells up and dominates all the space in my head. Sometimes they argue terribly and that’s the worst because it paralyses me. Those are the days when nothing gets done and I’m convinced that everything bad that could happen definitely will happen. Those are the days when I sometimes consider ending it all. It’s a scary thought but I won’t pretend that it never enters my head because honesty is always key in any discussion about mental health. But mostly, I’ve got used to their peaks and troughs and I’ve learned to accept that they are a part of me. 

I am also really lucky that I’ve been able to surround myself with friends (both online and offline) who understand. Whether they have Anxiety’s and Depression’s twins living in their heads or whether they simply love me in spite of them, I know how fortunate I am to have quite a few amazing people in my life. I also know that not everyone who suffers from mental health conditions has a strong support network, so I’d like to let anyone reading this know that I am happy to be the start of that for you. 

I think it’s especially important to tell our stories in this time of isolation and fearful uncertainty. Anxiety and Depression have almost certainly multiplied numerous times over, since the start of the pandemic and will continue to do so after lockdown, as the inevitable recession hits and our new ‘normal’ begins. If you need someone to talk to and can’t afford a professional therapist, you are welcome to drop me a message and just tell me whatever is on your mind. I know first-hand that it is often easier to talk to a stranger about deep dark things, so please don’t hesitate if you feel like you need a chat with someone inside your computer.

Please look after yourself and stay safe and kind. -Love, Alex x

[mandibierly]

The moment TV's teen revolution truly began

Claire Danes in My So-Called Life, Lennon Stella in Nashville, and Kristy McNichol in Family. (Photo: Everett Collection)

Back in the late ’70s, a full decade before Marshall Herskovitz and his producing partner, Ed Zwick, would change TV by creating thirtysomething, they cut their teeth as writers on the aptly titled ABC drama Family. Created by Jay Presson Allen and exec-produced by Leonard Goldberg, Aaron Spelling, and Mike Nichols, it revolved around the Lawrences, a family from Pasadena, Calif. whose youngest child was Buddy — the character that would launch Kristy McNichol’s career and, inadvertently, help inspire the most influential teen TV series of all time.

When Herskovitz and Zwick tapped Winnie Holzman to create My So-Called Life, an authentic early-’90s drama centered on a teenage girl, Angela Chase (Claire Danes), they wanted to upend the rules they had to once abide by.

“We used to get notes [on Family scripts] from Len Goldberg, and there would be a line and it said on it ‘NOB.’ I remember asking, ‘What does NOB stand for?’ and it meant, ‘Not Our Buddy,'” Herskovitz tells Yahoo Entertainment. “They wanted her to be nice all the time, and they wanted her to be a good girl. I think there was this way in which teens, but especially teenage girls, were still seen as voiceless in the culture. And I think that was the thing that most motivated us when we were doing My So-Called Life, was to say, ‘These are people within our lives who need to be heard.'”

If Herskovitz’s memory is correct, one “NOB” scene had Buddy, who he notes was younger than 15-year-old Angela when the series began, talking back to her mother “too stridently.”

“Which is so funny to me,” he says, “because in My So-Called Life, Angela would scream at her mother. Basically, she wanted to kill her mother. So, certainly, there was a change.”

As part of our Why Teen TV Matters series, we spoke with Herskovitz, who’s now co-showrunner of CMT’s Nashville with Zwick, about the other shifts he’s witnessed in his 40-plus-year TV career.

The beginning

Wilson Cruz as Rickie and Danes in My So-Called Life. (Photos: Everett Collection)

Most people agree that the Teen TV genre didn’t even exist until My So-Called Life. “It’s funny, I used to talk about this with Ed Zwick all the time, that I would get very disturbed watching television as a child, because it in no way resembled what my life looked and felt like, and I couldn’t figure out who was crazy,” Herskovitz says, recalling that he found My Three Sons with Fred MacMurray particularly unnerving. “It’s in the nature of sitcoms to basically portray people as clinically insane: like one week they are completely obsessed with something, they start a business and they get the whole neighborhood involved, and it causes some horrible thing to happen, and the next week that’s completely forgotten and they’re doing something else. Because My Three Sons was mostly about these teenage boys, I found it to be utterly perplexing and disturbing.”

When he, Zwick, and Holzman, who had been a writer on thirtysomething, were brainstorming ideas for a new series, it was Herskovitz who initially suggested doing a drama focused on teens. “I had written a pilot for Showtime in the mid-’80s, when Showtime was just beginning, as a matter of fact, about a 17-year-old boy, and I found myself exploring issues that I had never seen on television before,” he says. “Most shows about teens on television [in the early ’90s, like Beverly Hills, 90210] were very exploitative about sexuality and meant to be titillating rather than inside the experience of what it meant to be an adolescent. What I said to Winnie was, ‘This is something that still interests me, what about you?’ And she said, ‘My God, this is something I think about every day.'”

ABC initially passed on the pilot and then never quite knew what to do with the show, right down to its loud MTV-esque promos. “They completely ignored the fact that the show was so introspective. And we kept telling them, ‘This is a show for grownups. Every grownup was once a teenager. You’re not getting what we have here,” he says. “And they just never believed in the show. In fact, it took two and a half years to do the 19 episodes that we produced. I remember Ed had made an appeal to [then network president] Bob Iger when they were talking about canceling the show, saying, ‘You should keep this show on the air because teenage girls have no voice in our culture and the show is giving them a voice.’ And the irony of that is so incredible now, 25 years later, because teenage girls have such a huge voice in the culture. I mean, look at the Parkland kid [Emma Gonzalez].”

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students Emma Gonzalez, left, David Hogg, and Cameron Kasky raising their voices. (Photos: Getty Images, AP)

Like every showrunner who’s participated in our series, he’s been inspired by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students. “I’m not the only person to think these kids are incredible. One of the things that strikes me is that, quite naturally, this group is so heterogeneous — there are boys and girls, and people of different ethnic backgrounds — and I find that so refreshing and lovely to see that it naturally happens that way. And also, how together they are, how much solidarity they have, how generous they are with each other. It’s an extraordinary moment, it really is,” Herskovitz says. “They have this extraordinary moral high ground. I mean, no one should have to be in fear for their life when they go to school. And it’s reaching the point now where every kid in this country is afraid for his or her life. You cannot not listen to these people.”

In 1994, My So-Called Life had an episode, “Guns and Gossip,” that deals with a gun accidentally going off in school — a cautionary tale that Herskovitz still sees as current. Gay student Rickie (Wilson Cruz) is being bullied so badly that he’s OK with people believing he’s the one who brought in the weapon because it might make them think he’s dangerous and scare them off. “It was really a multifaceted story about the pressures kids go through in high school, using this gun as the instigating incident, but really it was never about the gun,” he says. “What touched me most about that episode was the storyline about Brian Krakow, played by Devin Gummersall, who the principal decided he was going to browbeat into getting him to rat on whoever it was brought the gun. So it became a different kind of bullying, where the principal was bullying this kid and tried to intimidate him and scare him, and, finally, at the end, Brian stands up to the principal, and says, ‘You’re harassing me, and if you keep doing it I’m going to sue you.’ It was just a wonderful moment that I just love, where the kid found his voice and stood up to the grownup.”

Herskovitz’s favorite episode of the series is “The Zit,” a particularly poetic one written by Holzman based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “It’s about Angela having a zit that’s tormenting her the whole time — that somehow her entire life will be ruined by the fact that she has this huge zit on her chin — and, meanwhile, they’re learning about how, in the Kafka story, this guy wakes up as a cockroach,” he says. “It’s about how each kid’s image of themselves is so negative and tortured, and, also, untrue — and how they are being so done in by what they feel they have to be in order to fit into society. It’s such a remarkable piece of work.”

Jason Katims, the future showrunner of Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, and Rise who got his start in the My So-Called Life writers’ room, has cited the episode as an example of their goal: “to tell as little story as possible.”

“Honestly, we did not write that show in any way differently for teens. In other words, we wrote that show the same way we wrote thirtysomething,” Herskovitz says. “It was about teens, and so we were inside the experience of what it means to be a teenager, which means things are felt more intensely. There’s less context in which to help to get yourself off the ledge when you think something is horrible. But, really, it was the same approach, which is to say, ‘How can we honestly depict how people experience themselves in the world?’ And that’s a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of thought, and a lot of self-exploration, a lot of honesty, and I felt that that’s what Winnie was so brilliant at.”

Back to the future

Marshall and Zwick also created the family drama Once and Again, which ran on ABC from 1999-2002. Browse clips on YouTube, and you’ll be reminded of a storyline where teen Grace (Julia Whelan) grew very close to a teacher, played by Eric Stoltz. When we talked with The Vampire Diaries‘ Julie Plec, who worked on Dawson’s Creek for a time, she said someone might have to think twice today about doing a storyline like Pacey sleeping with his teacher. Herskovitz agrees. “But remember, in Once and Again, it never was fully realized. You understood that he had a crush on her and she had a crush on him, but it wasn’t about, ‘Oh, they’re going to have an affair.’ It was more about the idea that two people who are inappropriate to each other would still have feelings for each other, and I might still be interested in exploring that today,” he says. “I mean, I find the idea of exploring what can’t be, but what you still want is a part of human nature.”

  Human nature is also why he’d concur with Holzman, who told us looking back on MSCL through the prism of the #MeToo movement she has “no regrets” about the use of the bad boy trope — Angela’s crush on Jared Leto’s Jordan Catalano, who didn’t always treat her well. If characters are “neatly shorn of their problems, they’re not really gonna feel like people that you’re actually encountering,” Holzman said — and mistakes are how people learn.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that it’s not necessarily the moment in the culture for men to say a lot about the #MeToo movement, so I think I should not say a lot,” Herskovitz begins, “but I will say that there have been many moments in my life where I felt the culture tried to simplify human nature or simplify the way humans should be in this world, and that has never interested me. … Men are complicated, women are complicated, there are bad people in this world, there are confused people in this world, and I’m only interested in exploring the entire universe that exists inside a human being — and part of that universe is dark, and part of it is light. I wouldn’t have any problem talking about a girl’s attraction to a bad boy today because that exists in human nature. I’m not saying it’s good or bad — I’m just saying it exists — and I would want to portray it as part of a developmental process because I think it is.”

Danes and Jared Leto as Jordan Catalano in My So-Called Life. (Photos: Everett Collection)

So many of the producers who’ve participated in this “Why Teen TV Matters” series told us that My So-Called Life was the show that first taught them the impact a series could have. That’s the reason the series may be the one Herskovitz feels proudest of having worked on in his career. “Twenty-five years later, to hear with some regularity how it influenced people, or how they felt in some way empowered by it, or just understood is a remarkable feeling, frankly. And I give Winnie all the credit. I mean, she made that happen, and I am just so happy to be able to help her bring that vision to the world,” he says.

In retrospect, he can even appreciate that My So-Called Life is “like the James Dean of television shows” — that in some way, it’s better that they only got to make 19 episodes. “Because it lives in this perfect memory of each one was a gem,” he says. “I’d like to believe that if we had done five seasons of it, it could have been still great, but there is something about it having died young that just adds to that feeling of specialness about it.”

He’s, of course, also proud of the equally groundbreaking thirtysomething, which ran from 1987 to 1991, and, in his words, “went right up to that envelope of how little story could you have and still fill an hour of television — because the less story you had, the more human interactions and moments of life that you could depict.” But he points to a movie he directed, 1998’s Dangerous Beauty, based on the true story of 16th century Venetian courtesan/poet Veronica Franco, as well.

“The idea behind this film was to explore the idea of women owning their own sexuality, and not being stopped by the chain and punishments that society so often forced on them,” he says. Though it wasn’t a blockbuster, it became a kind of cult hit on Netflix with women who considered it an anthem. “I was very proud of that, and I was actually very conscious while I was making it that in some way I was making it for my daughters, even though they were too young for it at the time,” he says. “The idea of them becoming women and navigating their own lives, I wanted to create a message of something that showed the possibility of liberation.”

Empowering young women is something he still strives to do on Nashville, with Lennon and Maisy Stella’s characters, Maddie and Daphne. Bringing us full circle, “There’s just an assumption on this show that these kids are going to speak their minds. There’s no pretense that they are going to be ‘ladylike,’ in some old-fashioned sense of what girls are supposed to be,” he says. “They argue with their father, they argue with each other, they just live their lives, and I love that. I love that they are fully realized in that way.”

My So-Called Life is currently streaming on Hulu. Watch all 19 episodes for free on Yahoo View. Nashville returns for the start of its final episodes June 7 on CMT.

Read more “Why Teen TV Matters” from Yahoo Entertainment:

Why ‘My So-Called Life’ is the most influential teen show ever

‘My So-Called Life’ and ‘Parenthood’ creators on Parkland teens ‘changing the conversation’ on TV and in real life

Show creator looks back at 4 decades of ‘Degrassi,’ from abortion to Drake

Joss Whedon on Parkland students: ‘I’ve been writing about kids like these for a long while. I thought I was writing fantasy.’

Why social media is the biggest issue teen TV should tackle

Why vampires aren’t as sexy in the age of #MeToo