Angela Chase

Angela Chase has just dyed her hair red and abandoned her childhood best friend to orbit the wilder, more interesting Rayanne Graff. She's fifteen, narrating her own life in breathless voiceover, aching after Jordan Catalano from across the hall, and trying to figure out who she's supposed to be now that who she was no longer fits.

The show trusts that a teenage girl's inner life is worth this much attention, and Claire Danes plays every shift of feeling — boredom, longing, shame, sudden joy — without softening any of it into cuteness. Her stammering voiceover shouldn't work as drama, but it makes ordinary adolescence feel exactly as enormous as it actually is.