Cand has it really been 30 years since Angela Chase fell for Jordan Catalano just because he was so weird? Welcome to Life, created by Winnie Holzman, made its television debut on August 25, 1994, and has established itself as a cultural benchmark over the past three decades, in part because Claire Danes and Jared Leto, both of whom broke out on the show, went on to become bona fide movie stars. But is the series still viable as a TV drama? I dug out my DVDs again – it was briefly available to stream on Disney+ in the UK, but isn’t at the moment – and watched it for the first time in a decade. And now I can very well believe it’s been 30 years. It looks old, but what’s more strange is that it feels it. It is very much a show of its time, and of a different time.

Still, I kept enjoying it, for reasons more befitting an adult, and that’s why the show was and is so special. At the time, its portrait of the life and psyche of a teenage girl was revolutionary. This wasn’t a show about teenagers played by 35-year-olds in California; it was about 15-year-olds in a fictional Pittsburgh suburb, most of them working class, whose family lives left them helpless and lost. Guided by Angela’s voiceover, a teen-angst rambling that was always allowed to be flawed and awkward, the show looked at complicated friendships, social hierarchies, parents, family, sex, drugs and wild crushes from the psyche of its young protagonist. I also watched Inside Out 2 this week, and although Riley is younger than Angela, the guiding principle is not dissimilar. When Angela makes yet another bad decision, you can’t help but wonder if fear or embarrassment is sitting at the controls, pulling the levers.

What strikes me now is how romantic it is. Not necessarily in Angela’s crush on Jordan, which is understandable on one hand, as he’s a blank canvas with his beautiful hair, but also horrible when you look at him as an adult, due to behavior that more emotionally literate teens would surely call “toxic,” though he was able to grow up thanks to an unlikely connection with Brian Krakow. The real romance lies in the friendship at the core of it. Angela ditch her old best friend Sharon Cherski (Devon Odessa) to hang out with the semi-outsiders — sweet, troubled Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) and wild Rayanne Graff (AJ Langer), who drinks, sleeps with everyone and tries to sneak her into clubs. When Rayanne’s mom meets Angela’s mom, Patty (Bess Armstrong), she explains that it’s like they’re in love. “She wants Be “Angela,” she says, and Angela wants to be Rayanne in return.

I didn’t pay much attention to the adults the first time around, and I’m sure it comes with age, but the parents are a lot funnier than I remembered. When Angela says she “dyed her hair,” she glows crimson, not red, her mother quips, “I thought it was dyed a natural death.” I was deeply in love with her husband Graham (Tom Irwin) when he began considering an affair, and with Patty, who I hoped would soon realize they shouldn’t be working together anymore. There were other details I hadn’t noticed. Angela says “in my humble opinion” because her mother says so; the parallels between their personalities are now clear as day. Rayanne is always hungry and always eats at other people’s houses because she can’t get proper food at home. When Rickie tells his female companion at prom that he’s gay, it’s truly groundbreaking: Wilson Cruz was the first openly gay actor to play an openly gay character on network television.

The show shows so much empathy for all of its characters, not just the leads. It’s forced, but it gives everyone an amazing fullness, even poor little sister Danielle (Lisa Wilhoit), who no one has time for. One of the show’s executive producers, Edward Zwick, who made Thirtysomething, explains in his just-released memoir that Danes was just so good in her audition that they knew they had to cast her. But because she was only 15 at the time of filming, they had to adhere to strict limits on her work hours. That meant they had to give everyone else more to do, hence the breadth and depth of the show.

For all its maturity, Welcome to Life is a product of its time. The pace is far less frenetic than today’s television, the action lingers and the scares are noticeably quieter. This is fascinating, but also oddly sad. One of the first episodes centers on a gunshot in school. When the kids in class hear the bang, they all run into the hallway to see what happened. Parents are worried, but the students are mostly indifferent and assured of their safety. As a brief snapshot of how the world has changed, this is devastating.

There was only one season of Welcome to Life. Zwick says she was subjected to “death by a thousand cuts” by the network because they didn’t think teenagers were an important audience for TV advertising. But I tell you, with only 19 meandering, perfectly imperfect episodes, we had a lot of fun. Didn’t we? We did. We had a lot of fun.