my so-called analysis

While watching a few episodes of My So-Called Life over the weekend, a few things struck me.

So. Much. Flannel. Ah, the joys of early-mid '90s fashion. I remember getting my first flannel shirt and thinking it'd make me cool. God did middle school suck.

Some of the plotlines are surprisingly conventional. One example: parents go away for the weekend, the kids do something wrong that'll get them in big trouble and spend the whole weekend trying to cover their asses, yet only manage to solve the problem after the parents get home. Doesn't get much more Brady Bunch than that. Plenty of other episodes deal with more cutting-edge issues (school shootings, for example),

Discourse markers all over the place. Especially like. I became rather attuned to this sort of thing after working on MDE at the LDC over the summer. People say like and or something all the time. People on scripted TV generally don't. But the characters of My So-Called Life do. Something about the dialogue struck me as being off. What I'm not sure about is whether that oddness came from the novelty of TV characters talking like real people or the fact that the writers didn't quite capture the way people actually use discourse markers. They could have benefitted from some doing some MDE annotation...