‘Too Long; Didn’t Watch’ Recap: Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally Talk ‘My So-Called Life’

Welcome to the latest episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch, a new podcast produced by Rolling Stone and OBB Sound, presented by Google Assistant, and hosted by yours truly. In each episode, we attempt a new method of scaling Peak TV, by pairing a celebrity guest with a series they’ve never seen and showing them only the very first and very last episodes, to see if they can figure out what in the world happened in between.

This week, we welcome the First Couple of TV Comedy, a.k.a. spouses Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally, who became stars separately on Will & Grace (for her) and Parks and Recreation (for him), and can currently be heard as two of the voices on Fox’s ultra-charming animated show The Great North, from the Bob’s Burgers team. The episode not only features our first pair of guests, but our first time applying the TLDW formula to a show that only ran for one season: My So-Called Life, the brilliant-but-canceled mid-Nineties teen drama that launched the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto, among others.

My So-Called Life is one of the great one-season wonders television has ever seen, but I was curious whether the podcast’s gimmick would work with a show where so few episodes passed between pilot and finale. Fortunately, there was a lot to talk about, from Danes’ precocious genius as narrator Angela Chase to the show’s groundbreaking portrayal of Angela’s queer friend Rickie Vasquez, several years before Will & Grace would arrive in primetime and help change straight America’s perception of the gay community. And, if you’ve seen any interview with both of my guests, or watched them act together on Parks and elsewhere, or listened to their own podcast, In Bed With Nick and Megan, you know just how much fun it is to hear them talk. So settle in for a hilarious stroll through one of TV’s most famous high-school hallways.

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Back next week with another first of sorts, as a new guest joins us to watch the pilot and finale of The Good Wife.