One of the 10 MOST ROMANTIC MOMENTS OF TV!!

[emma14]

Did you know the scene at the end of 'Self-Esteem" when Jordan grabs Angela's hand as he walks down the hall together,was voted one of the 10 most romantic moments by tv guide!!that is so cool!
AGREE??

Emily

[Megs]

Yes, I think it was romantic. But more so, I think it was bittersweet. I don't know if that's because I know what comes after that or not. The smile that Angela gives Jordan is so sweet it makes me ache for her, b/c I know the hurt that's coming. But if you look at it in it's simplest terms, the person you have been crushing on and obsessing over for months finally comes up to you in the hall at school, in front of everyone, and takes your hand. Hell yeah, that's romantic.

What was number 1 by the way?

[Natasha (candygirl)]

The poll is actually old news - it was published in TV Guide in 1997.

MSCL.com noted the Self Esteem moment - if you look in the yearbook section, the Buffalo Tom clip acknowledges the TV Guide assessment.

The two TV Guide polls were mentioned in this thread: one named the aforementioned Jordan and Angela holding hands at the end of Self Esteem as one of television's most romantic moments, and the second named Life of Brian as #38 in the top 100 greatest episodes of all time. You can see what TV Guide had to say about these episodes at Arthur's MSCL site. He also has a transcript of the Sassy article where I first read about MSCL. Ahhh, Sassy. RIP!

[Amika]

I love this scene. I think this scene deserved that award because its so great. It's like every teenager's fantasy. I read an MSCL transcript (it may have been here but it was changed since last I read it) where the scene was laid out so well. It went something like: "Jordan walks across the hall toward Angela IN FRONT OF EVERYONE he says: Can we...go somewhere? Angela says: Sure. They start walking down the hall and he silently holds her hand IN FRONT OF EVERYONE..."

Buffalo Tom

[Natasha (candygirl)]

The transcript you read must have been posted elsewhere. The transcripts here haven't been changed for years.

[catalano_16]

[color=olive][/color] :oops: sorry guys, i'm new to the forum & i was wondering how u got the small quotes @ the bottom of ur post messages? i want one soooo bad! o, & i luv the ending of selfesteem...it's lyke a dream

[TomSpeed]

What, Sassy is no more? Here's yet another sign that I'm stuck in the 80s. Sassy was THE hottest girl mag back in the day. I remember the commercials and ads. "She's Sassy!"

Back on topic...I love this scene, too. Being accepted and wanted are great feelings. I didn't feel those feelings in high school. The sad part is that my shyness and lack self-worth probably severely limited opportunities for me to have these feelings. So, I'm happy that Angela is being offered Jordan's hand and that Jordan is offering it. I've experienced those feelings in adulthood. But, it's been awhile since I've felt them. I'm afraid that I've fallen into some of the same patterns of behavior I had as a teenager. I'm always too busy, too bored, or too sad to make an attempt to meet anyone. I might not get hurt, but I also won't be happy.

[whitespy12]

So, if i'm not mistaken, My So-Called Life has been ranked in a total of 4 TV Guide polls?

-TV's Most Romantic Moments (2/3/97) - Jordan Catalano & Angela Hold Hands

-100 Greatest Episodes of All Time (6/23/97) - #38 - Life of Brian

-Top 25 Cult Shows Ever (5/30/04) - # 16 - My So-Called Life

-50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time (6/20/04) - # 49 - Graham Chase

[TomSpeed]

So, if i'm not mistaken, My So-Called Life has been ranked in a total of 4 TV Guide polls?

-TV's Most Romantic Moments (2/3/97) - Jordan Catalano & Angela Hold Hands

-100 Greatest Episodes of All Time (6/23/97) - #38 - Life of Brian

-Top 25 Cult Shows Ever (5/30/04) - # 16 - My So-Called Life

-50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time (6/20/04) - # 49 - Graham Chase

Wow! Those are good lists to be on. Are there 48 TV dads better than Graham though?

[whitespy12]

Wow! Those are good lists to be on. Are there 48 TV dads better than Graham though?

Yeah, I too thought thought that ranking was a little low. I mean, of course I can see Archie Bunker and Mike Brady being ahead of Graham... but Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher's character from "The O.C.")? Or Bernie Mac even? I think that's stretching it... of course, maybe that's because i'm a MSCL fan and not an O.C. or Bernie Mac fan..

[Jody Barsch*]

Wow! Those are good lists to be on. Are there 48 TV dads better than Graham though?

Clearly no one is better than Graham, he just lot some points from the final score for thinking Anne Frank was a sophomore and entertaining the thought that a person might have to play two instruments at once. (He did excellent in the wall papering and rissotto making events though.)

[sarahr_81]

i just watched this ep last night on tv, and, yes, it was bittersweet, but so cute at the same time, we were all waiting for him to grab her hand and show the world, hey, i like this girl!

[Natasha (candygirl)]

What, Sassy is no more? Here's yet another sign that I'm stuck in the 80s. Sassy was THE hottest girl mag back in the day. I remember the commercials and ads. "She's Sassy!"

Sassy was an awesome magazine. Jane is an okay substitute, but it just ain't the same. There was a great article in Bust about Sassy last month - the history, the controversy, and the sad, inevitable decline.

[Shattered]

And oh so well deserved. That moment made me smile. I still smile when i think about it.

[Natasha (candygirl)]

What, Sassy is no more? Here's yet another sign that I'm stuck in the 80s. Sassy was THE hottest girl mag back in the day. I remember the commercials and ads. "She's Sassy!"

Sassy was an awesome magazine. Jane is an okay substitute, but it just ain't the same. There was a great article in Bust about Sassy last month - the history, the controversy, and the sad, inevitable decline.

I found a copy of the article in question!

The Secret History of Sassy
Molly Simms, Bust Fall 2004 p. 68-73


Once there was a magazine that dared to speak to teenage girls the way teenage girls speak to each other. Then one day it was gone. What happened?

Some girls spent high school attending cheerleading practice, winning "Prettiest Hair" in the yearbook, and slow dancing at prom until dawn with the captain of the football team. For the rest of us who snuck cigarettes behind the art building, wore holes in our thrift-store cardigans, and helped our friends from the drama club during their coming-outs, there was Sassy magazine. Sassy broke new ground in the world of publishing, giving the misfit girls who felt no camaraderie with the lip-gloss-and-boy-advice rags Seventeen and YM something to cling to. Never before and never since has such a strange, snarky, intelligent teen magazine existed. After a scant-but-influential six years on the newsstand, during which time it was published by no less than four different companies, was the target of a right-wing boycott, and attracted an army of dedicated readers, its abrupt demise left many curious about what had happened behind the scenes.

Sassy was started in 1987 by an Australian publishing company, John Fairfax Limited, and was originally based on an Australian teen magazine called Dolly. Fairfax had just started an American arm of its company, and its president, a feisty and charismatic woman named Sandra Yates, was put in charge of the Sassy launch. "Dolly was a really, really successful magazine for teenagers. Sandra came to this country on a trip, and realized there were no good magazines for teenagers, that they were kind of in the Stone Age," Mary Clarke, former creative director at Sassy, explains. "The teen magazines [in America] were like Good Housekeeping for teenagers, speaking with parental voices," Yates told The Australian, back in 1988, about her new project. American teens, she said, needed a magazine that would take a tone of, "Hey guys, we're in this together." Marjorie Ingall, who avid Sassy readers will remember as the magazine's senior writer, recalls that back then, Dolly was "sniggeringly sexual," though "one thing that was cool was that it was about protecting yourself and about being sexually responsible, it wasn't just about 'Here's how to give a blowjob.'"

Twenty-four-year-old Jane Pratt (fresh from a position as an associate editor at McCall's was recruited to head the magazine as editor-in-chief, and sent for training in Australia. Christina Kelly was brought on board as an editor, and Mary Clarke was hired as beauty editor. Andrea Linett, Sassy's fashion editor (and current creative director at Lucky magazine), fot started at the magazine as a receptionist. "I used to sit there and smoke cigarettes while I answered the phone," she says, and recalls thinking Sassy was the most glamorous place I could possibly be. I thought Dolly magazine was the coolest thing in the world, and I used to try to dress like the girls in Dolly, with the knee socks, little skirts, Doc Martens, and everything."

It seemed clear from the beginning that Sassy would be no ordinary teen rag. "At the first editorial meeting in 1987, the staff sat around Jane's office, discussing how to make our new magazine different from other teenage publications. The unanimous first priority was to provide sex education. We knew the sex information published by teen magazines was scarce and usually couched in judgmental terms," former assistant editor Elizabeth Larsen recounted in an article for the Utne Reader.

Sassy's honesty about sexual matters was similar in tone to its inspiration, Dolly, but soon, Marjorie notes, "Sassy became so much better and broader than Dolly." Though Dolly seemed aimed to titillate with its sex banter, Sassy went far beyond the promise of its big sister, tackling issues with a slant that was virtually unknown at the time. Mary (who says she later "clawed [her] way up to creative director") says, "I think Jane had a very definite idea and found other people who had ideas and contributions of their own. But Jane didn't just come out and say, 'This is a magazine that's going to change the face of publishing.'" The first issue appeared on newsstands in March 1988.

A feminist bent was also evident in Sassy early on, and this was no accident. Yates herself was a committed feminist and long-time Ms. magazine reader, and two months after launching Sassy, Fairfax bought Ms. magazine, putting Yates in charge of breathing life back into the struggling quarterly. Then, one short year later, Fairfax was ready to sell off its U.S. holdings. Yates, passionate about both Sassy and Ms., started Matilda Publications with her business partner, Anne Summers, so that they could buy both titles. "We had about six weeks and we raised $20 million on Wall Street. It was only the second woman-led management buyout in U.S. corporate history, so we're quite proud of that," Yates told The Australian in 1988. Getting control of the magazines and running her own business, Yates later said, was "probably the best time in my life."

The magazine was headquartered in Times Square, an area that was notoriously seedy at the time. "We were in 1 Times Square, the building where the ball drops [on New Year's Eve]. We would come out of the building and there would be crack whores that you'd have to step over," Marjorie recalls. "I knbew at the time that it was a f***ing great job. I remember another writer bitterly spitting out that she was not going to be a lifer there, and I was like, 'I could be a lifer here, happily.' Having worked at another magazine, I knew that this was not always what it was like."

Former art director Amy Demas remembers that at Sassy, "editors had a very open-door policy, and I felt immediately a part of a team, that my voice mattered." Amy's voice smiles as she says, "I have fond memories of the staff meetings in Christina's office where we all sat on the floor -- she had this great black-and-white-checkered floor. We'd just pile in there, and everyone would brainstorm and talk about stories. It felt good to defy what was happening at the time in the world of teen magazines, to kind of be the rebel voice." Andrea adds, "It was just fun. I've talked to people who've had their boss throw things at them, and go crazy on the set and stuff like that, but [this] was more like college or something." College, in fact, may not have been such a far-out analogy: according to a June 1991 article, the average age of Sassy's staff at the time was 24.

Sassy's frank sexual content soon ran into harsh criticism. One woman from Wabash, Indiana, who ran a small Christian fundamental group called Women Aglow, was especially incensed by the magazine's content. Soon, she was able to get a larger group, called Focus on the Family Citizen, to take part in her protest. Mary described the debacle this way: "We had a whole Moral Majority [-style] campaign against us within the first year of publication, and the magazine almost went out of business. I don't think anyone knew that there would be such a strong reaction." In particular, Mary recalls that the group was bothered by a headline on the first issue. "It was something like, 'Think You're Ready for Sex? Read this First,' which wasn't saying, 'We Think You're Ready for Sex,' but that's how people took it." A later piece on gay couples further riled up Women Aglow, Mary says. As Andrea explains, "Women Aglow was doing a campaign saying, 'We're not going to buy your products, Proctor and Gamble' or whoever, 'unless you pull out of Sassy.' I remember they had a whole smear campaign, something like, 'Sassy is writing articles about how to have sex with snakes.' It was like, OK, where is that coming from?"

But the letter-writing campaign had a definite impact. According to the February 1989 Adweek, five of Sassy's advertisers pulled out in October 1988, as well as 12 newsstand chains who then refused to carry the mag, but a "prompt call for help from Yates produced a counter-campaign of support" from the Magazine Publishers of America and American Society of Magazine Editors. Adweek reported that, with this counterattack, 10 out of the 12 chains reinstated Sassy immediately, and two of the five advertisers came back to the magazine. For the moment, it seemed, Sassy had dodged the conservative right wing's bullet. Still, the writing was on the wall. "The kids loved Sassy, but it was very dependent on advertising revenue, and so the loss of those advertisers was just a killer blow," Yates would later recall.

Soon, Yates' investors were demanding that the magazines be sold off. In 1990, Yates reluctantly sold both Sassy and Ms. to a New York based publishing company, Lang Communications, and stepped aside. Lang already owned a few other magazines, including Working Woman and Working Mother. Sassy would stay at Lang for the next four years, albeit with a few changes.

On June 20, 1991, an Orange County Register article reported that Sassy had "toned down its frank approach to sex." Jane explained, "You want to give information about AIDS, pregnancy, whatever. Yet we can't come out and say they're having sex. We've learned to be really careful about how we present information." Yet, Marjorie undermines the importance of the conservative groups in Sassy's development, explaining, "You know, one thing that the religious right didn't really count on when they freaked out about the sex stuff in the first few months of the magazine was that it ended up being so much more subversive when we couldn't talk about sex. Because we were talking about politics and social issues, and that was much, much scarier. Telling girls to be independent thinkers, that's much scarier than telling girls how to give a blowjob."

In fact, sexual dialogue was the least of Sassy's revolutionary behaviors in the world of teen girlie mags. Sassy approached issues that most other rags would have regarded as either deadwood or a hot potato, such as the Gulf War, puppy mills, and having a gay relative. Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch magazsine, spent four months as a Sassy intern in college, the ultimate fulfillment of her long-time fandom of the magazine. Andi recalls loving the fact that Sassy "wasn't speaking from this position of authority. It was just, 'Oh my God, Jane got her period, and totally wasn't expecting it, and she ruined her new Kookai pants!'" Reminiscing, Andi says, "I remember some of their cover lines were like, "Your Prom Doesn't Have to Suck," which is something that Seventeen would never say, but it was true. Prom was such a hoo-ha, but everyone was ultimately disappointed by it. It was never what you thought it would be. I think it was the whole idea that your prom could suck, your parents could be as confused as you, boys could be human rather than this other species. These were all pieces of information that weren't widely made available. The voice was a huge part of the appeal, and the sense that Sassy's writers were just grown-up teen girls was just energizing in a way. It was like, 'You don't have to grow up and have a job you hate. You could grow up and have a job like this.'"

By all accounts, Sassy was a great place to work. In particular, Marjorie misses the way Sassy provided a community of smart women around her all the time. "I miss this real sense of mission, the sense of loving teenage girls, because we loved the teenage girls that we were and wanted to be helpful and wanted to be respectful and funny and good, and we really did want to be their friend, as opposed to wanting to sell them s**t." Mary describes the Sassy office as "so much fun. It was really laughing all the time. My boyfriend, now husband, would come by and he always said, 'Every time I come by you're just laughing, and it's not like you're working!' The first office, we just had the teeniest cubicles you can imagine, and we were just all packed together. It's a good thing that we all got along so well. Definitely a lot of giggling and laughing and joking around, and Neill playing music in the art department, and you know, Andrea is the world's funniest person... It was really, really fun." She recalls, "The level of trust and respect that people had for each other was just really fantastic. And the happier you are, the better your work." Amy succinctly explains, "I miss the 'tude. I miss the sass."

Things began to go sour in 1994. Mary remembers that something seemed awry when she and other Sassy staffers "began to notice things. Vendors call and say, 'I haven't been paid' -- anyone from the photographers, to a studio, to the caterers for a shoot. You just started noticing over a few months that people were starting to nag you." Marjorie similarly recalls freelancers not being paid, "which is what magazines do when they're going under." In a display of gallows humor, Marjorie says, "we had that sheet that magazines have with all the story ideas for the next issue, and they were all made-up bullshit things that we could never do. It was all a bunch of jokes because we just knew that there wasn't gonna be a next issue." Lang was, in fact, experiencing financial woes. He had never managed to fully pay off the debts he'd inherited when he bought the magazine from Matilda. Sassy's ad sales had dropped from $12.1 million in 1993 to $10.7 million in one year, and its subscriber base wasn't growing. "Advertisers did not increase their budgets for teen markets. Now there are more titles. So what are we supposed to do?" Lang said in a New York Times article. What Lang decided to do was cut his losses. An October 28, 1994 Women's Wear Daily discussed Lang's intention to sell Sassy, saying Lang "recently agreed to sell because he no longer would put funds into the publication, which was losing money." Mary remembers coming back from lunch to find a memo from Dale Lang, saying, "I regret to inform you that I'm putting the magazine up for sale." "We had a month where we were told to keep coming into the office, but we were no longer supposed to work on producing the next issue. So that was pretty weird. You would just kind of come and do nothing, except worry."

Eventually, Lang found a buyer for Sassy in Petersen Publishing, an L.A.-based company who also published 'Teen along with other titles such as Car Craft, Golfing, and Guns & Ammo. Marjorie remembers the last days of Sassy thusly: "Lang called a meeting and they said, 'Well, we're selling it to this company in L.A., but we're not moving the magazine and you guys are all gonna lose your jobs, and don't worry. OK, so we'll see what happens. Now, go clear out your desks.'" She laughs, saying, "That was my memory of it, I'm not sure that that's exactly what happened."

In fact, everyone on the old Sassy staff was let go, and replaced by new Petersen hires. The last pre-Petersen issue of Sassy, the Celebrity-Produced issue, was never printed, but would have featured Liz Phair on the cover, with pieces by James Iha and Mayim Bialik. (You can find bits and pieces of the lost, unpublished Sassy online, at http://www.blairmag.com/sissy.) In 1995, Adweek reported that Sassy would premiere a "revamped and surprisingly un-sassy" new look. "This is a Petersen magazine. We are not going to go over the edge," the new Sassy editorial director Catherine Ettlinger (the former editor-in-chief of Elle) told Adweek. "We have underage girls reading this magazine." More fashion and beauty content was added to the magazine; the sassified "Zits 'n Stuff" page was replaced with a standard "Beauty Q&A." And the sex education was exemplified by an article warning girls not to flirt with men too much, with a good old-fashioned "she asked for it" rationale. "Men think about sex all the time -- some studies show as much as six times an hour," the Stepford Sassy warned. "No wonder they get carried away sometimes!" By the end of 1995, the shiny, happy, Petersen-produced Sassy had lost 20 percent of its readership; by 1996, it folded.

Ex-staffers have their own ideas as to why the old Sassy didn't survive. Amy Demas opines, "I just think it suffered from kind of being first and not being understood by the business world, the advertising world. I think it was just so ahead of its time that people weren't ready for it." According to Marjorie, rags like Seventeen and YM "were much more advertiser-friendly. If you're an eyeliner company, are you going to buy space in a magazine that says you don't have to wear eyeliner, or one that says, 'Kick him to the curb if he doesn't like your blue eyeliner!'?"

Mary Clarke's explanation for the death of Sassy concerns distribution and the publisher's lack of adequate funding. "Lang Communications didn't have a lot of money, so we could only produce one editorial page for every ad page. So, if you only have 35 pages of ads, then you're only going to have a 70-page magazine." She continues, "People are going to buy based on thickness. They just don't feel like they're getting their money's worth on the newsstand if the magazine feels like a pamphlet." It's noteworthy that, according to Mary, Sassy's numbers weren't all that shabby. Though Sassy represented girls outside of the mainstream, it didn't suffer from a lack of interest from the world at large. In fact, a March 2002 Mediaweek piece estimated the magazine's circulation as topping out at 800,000. In comparison, Jane's media kit reports its June 2003 circulation as 700,000. "I would say that 85 to 90 percent of [our demise] was that we just weren't owned by a Hearst of a Conde Nast or a Time Warner. I think had we been, they could have given us better distribution, let us produce a thicker magazine," Mary adds.

In the end, while Sassy was known in some circles as the teen magazine willing to talk about sex with an honest, open voicer, "I think the stuff that made people go crazy about Sassy was the quirkiness and the genuine respect for the reader," says Marjorie. "'Empowerment' is the stupidest word in the world, but Sassy had the belief that there is an exciting world out there that is beyond your body, and we think you probably want to know about it." Today she's a successful freelance writer, but when she thinks back to her days at Sassy, even to the minutiae of magazine-production drudgery, her voice brightens and gets quicker. "There was this vibrant, buzzing energy of the place. I liked making changes in the art department. I even liked sitting there and learning about text-formatting. I liked everything."