...and maybe a Brian we should have chosen! :D

Seriously! It was pretty clear to me too that they would have kissed. They should consider doing a continuation of the story with a new cast. I think it would still get a great receptive audience.

You're correct that the main reason MSCL had only one season is because Claire Danes wanted out at the end of season one, but it's ABC's role in why she wanted out that is missing from your post. When CD was cast she was 13 years old, virtually unknown as an actress, and had little prior professional acting experience. That made the studio and network nervous, and so the show went through more rounds of red-light/green-light before the pilot was ever aired than your average kindergarten class. It took two years to complete filming of the pilot episode alone because of that. The two main elements in play making TPTB nervous were whether a show like MSCL, in and of itself, could pull in sufficient ratings and whether an unknown, and therefore untested, actress like CD could deliver the goods both as Angela Chase and in terms of ratings. Networks and studios rarely know up front whether a show will be a hit or an epic failure, but MSCL made them more nervous than usual for a new show. Regarding the stories themselves, both the throughlines and the one played out in individual episodes, the writers were making every epidsode as real and true to being 15 as they could and no one knew whether this sort of show could draw in and keep an audience. The writers were not only trying to make the teen characters as real as possible given that it was a tv show, they were also striving for realism with the parents and Danielle. You ask most adults whether they'd like to re-live high school and 9 out of 10 will say no so again, the network had to ask itself was MSCL a gamble worth taking? In the time span between being cast in pilot of MSCL and when the piolot was finally completed and the show actually scheduled to air, CD's career began to take off. She was still largely unknown outside of Hollywood, but that was all about to change. She won roles in three major motion picture projects and was filming them alongside MSCL. She was also a young teen herself. When MSCL was wrapping and discussions of a second season were beginning to take place, CD wasn't sure she wanted to be a part of a project that had taken so much out of her emotionally and physically. All of the roles on MSCL were emotionally draining for the actors to play, just as they were draining and painful for the writers to write. As for CD specifically, not only was she working on multiple projects at once, each demanding different parts of her as an actress, she was also traveling for some of the projects and still in high school. It shouldn't surprise anyone, then, that as talks of season 2 were beginning, CD was tired - physically and also emotionally from all the starts and stops that MSCL had been through over the previous two years. CD has said before that her two main reasons for not wanting to do MSCL after season 1 were because of the emotional toll that all the stops and starts took on her as an actress and as a person and because her film career was taking off and wanted to pursue it. The time it took to film the pilot was the worst of it, but because MSCL never quite brought ABC the ratings it wanted, the show was consistently in danger, at least in the media, of cancellation. When you put as much of yourself creatively into a project as went into MSCL, and not just CD here, it's taxing both physically and psychologically. And ABC just let her take the fall.ABC didn't lie exactly, CD didn't want to continue with the show, but they weren't forthcoming with the rest of the story either, at least not then. As for your contentions that they didn't just try and recast Angela, how could they have? Would the fans of MSCL have accepted anyone else in that role, of course not. CD was so good as Angela Chase that there was no show without her - one of two things ABC arguably got right about this show at the time. The other is the timing of the initial airing. MSCL might very well have been cancelled had it aired earlier, when it was originally set to given the times, however, given the success of the show later on MTV it might have done better in the ratings had it aired then for the first time, but then it would have been made with a different cast so who really knows what might have been?Like all freshman shows, MSCL took a handful of episodes before it really reached it's stride and found it's "voice", but once it got there, it was magic. Yet despite only airing for a single season, MSCL struck a chord with viewers and continues to do so today.