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This season marks the fifteenth anniversary of the critically acclaimed but ratings-challenged television drama, My So-Called Life. Critics and TV aficionados alike still refer to Life with a certain awe, the kind of reverence typically reserved for a long-lost significant other that could have been The One. I recently finished watching the series’ entire nineteen-episode run on Hulu, having decided to check it out because I was curious whether it would live up to the hype.

At first glance, it’s not hard to understand why MSCL was canceled. The biggest problem was that ABC, which indecisively waited to schedule the show for a full year after seeing the pilot (which they loved), chose to introduce it in the fall of 1994 on Thursday nights at 8 PM, directly opposite another modest freshman show called Friends. Much better shows than this one would have crumbled under the weekly onslaught of Chandler, Joey, Ross, Phoebe, Monica, and Rachel.

Even leaving this ultimately insurmountable challenge aside, however, it’s unclear whether audiences were ready for what MSCL had to offer. It was a teen drama in an era before that genre really existed as such, making it hard to schedule, hard to market, and hard to appreciate. The closest analogue at the time was The Wonder Years, which had ended its run in the spring of 1993. But unlike its popular predecessor, My So-Called Life didn’t simply want to take baby boomers back to their experiences growing up in the 60s; it aimed to speak directly to teenagers right now about the experience of being a teenager today, while also returning older viewers to their long-buried passions and insecurities.

Meanwhile, Life was also very different from the show that would, sadly, become the prototype for the modern teen drama: Beverly Hills, 90210. Indeed, its creators have described it as something of an anti-90210, an attempt to tell the true story of adolescence instead of the glossy Rodeo Drive version. Even now, with what amounts to an entire broadcast network’s worth of teen dramas programmed every season, we don’t have a single one anywhere on the schedule that aspires to the same kind of arresting honesty that was MSCL‘s raison d’être. (The only show of comparable candor today, Friday Night Lights, has faced similar struggles to find an audience. It’s no surprise to discover that Jason Katims, FNL‘s head writer, worked on My So-Called Life early in his career.)

But these circumstantial considerations, while they provide a partial explanation for the show’s cancellation, do not speak to its quality. For all the nostalgia surrounding it, was My So-Called Life actually good television?

MSCL‘s single greatest strength lay in Claire Danes’ brilliant performance as Angela Chase, the series’ 15-year-old protagonist, which earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama Series. I have never seen such a singularly accurate portrayal of the teenage experience’s fundamental contradiction: the desperation to be noticed and yet also to be invisible. Danes clearly benefited from being the same age as Angela during filming; she seems to have drawn on feelings about her own adolescence to know exactly when to employ understatement and when to resort to histrionics, exactly how long to hold an awkward moment, exactly how hard to laugh or to cry.

For proof, just watch Danes in the very last scene of the entire series (which isn’t really a spoiler, but consider this fair warning). It’s marvelous to watch the panoply of emotions cross Angela’s face in these three minutes or so.

Unlike her dramatically challenged counterparts of today, Danes brought an earnest credibility to the role that elevated the entire show, giving it a penetrating, intensely personal quality. Many of the other MSCL actors did solid jobs, but it’s hard to stand out next to Danes; the one exception is Wilson Cruz, who played Angela’s gay and sometimes-homeless friend, Rickie Vasquez, with conviction and grace, at a time when gay characters in primetime were anything but ordinary.

Of course, good actors are powerless without good writing. Showrunner Winnie Holzman reportedly went “undercover” in high schools and wrote make-believe diary entries to orient herself in the teenage psyche and vernacular. As a result, the show’s dialogue carries a sense of authenticity that can probably only be fully appreciated by true children of the 90s; more than probably any teen drama I’ve seen, I can watch My So-Called Life and say with confidence, “people actually talked like this.” (Early appearances of Angela’s unbelievably silent love interest, Jordan Catalano, and the sometimes over-the-top ramblings of friend Rayanne Graff are notable exceptions.)

Equally incisive are the depictions of Angela’s relationship with her parents. I love the scene in “On the Wagon” in which Patty and Graham watch, dumbfounded, as the habitually reticent Angela saunters into the kitchen, abruptly divulges all kinds of details about what’s bothering her, and then walks away as though this were an everyday occurrence. (“It’s okay. She’ll ignore you for another month just to make up for it.”)

While many of the show’s characters seem cookie-cutter at first — the socially inept brainiac, the wild girl with abandonment issues, and so on — they are written with remarkable sensitivity and perceptiveness, making them real and complicated. Even the adults in the show develop into characters we care about, flawed and fascinating, after starting out as mere stand-ins for authority and the establishment.

To be clear, MSCL was not without its missteps; it faltered in the ways that any new, risky drama should be expected to do, as the writers and the actors all work to find their voices. The Halloween and Christmas episodes, for example, both dabbled oddly in the supernatural, with the latter showcasing a young homeless girl who turned out to be, like, an angel, or something. The show also struggled a bit when it veered into lesson-of-the-week territory, with episodes on censorship, teen sex, substance abuse, and other weighty subjects often seeming too preachy for their own good.

Perhaps the broadest potential criticism of Life is that it was simply too melodramatic, too absorbed in its own gravity to be relevant. It’s certainly true that the show makes a big deal out of small things, seemingly turning every chance hallway encounter into a moment, laden with subtext and innuendo. But you know what? That’s exactly what it’s like to be a teenager. Time does seem to slow down, and the rest of the scene does shift out of focus, when you make deliberately-accidental eye contact with your crush on the way to homeroom. MSCL, whether by luck or by skill, manages to capture perfectly the sheer intensity of these adolescent obsessions, making it hard to call the show’s studied solemnity anything other than magnificently true-to-life.

After all, this is what good drama does. It takes us to a place and makes that place real. In this, My So-Called Life was a tremendous achievement. It was a show with remarkable creative potential and emotional resonance that died long before its time, a victim of a confluence of unfavorable circumstances. (Danes, whose agents hoped to steer her toward a film career, clearly played a part in the show’s cancellation, but her expression of doubt was merely a nail in the coffin of an already troubled show, not the main reason as some scapegoaters have alleged.) Indeed, Ted Harbert, ABC’s head of programming at the time, has called not fighting harder to save Life “[his] biggest mistake at ABC.” The show made history even in its cancellation, becoming what appears to be the first show ever to earn a serious Internet-organized plea for its life.

As always, it’s hard to say whether My So-Called Life would have stepped it up or tripped over itself, had it been given the chance of a sophomore season. What is clear, however, is that its failure had far-reaching consequences. It set the stage for a modern teen drama genre that would inherit its defining sensibilities not from the unwavering honesty of Three Rivers, Pennsylvania, but rather from the unabashed hedonism of Beverly Hills, 90210.

And that, like, totally sucks.