The nineties were awesome.
Look, I know everybody idolises the first decade they can properly remember but this is different. The nineties really were awesome. The Cold War was over, the War on Terror hadn’t started, we’d fixed acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer (and that whole global warming thing would probably sort itself out) and the only threats to world peace were goobs like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic who would occasionally show up to cause trouble before being punted into the air like Team Rocket.
Plus, the movies, the TV shows, the music. I love this whole era. So I was overjoyed when I finally got my hands on a boxset of the complete Daria, an animated sitcom that ran from 1997 to 2002. Not merely a nineties show, but probably the most nineties show.
And imagine my disappointment on discovering that, like so much nostalgia, it doesn’t actually hold up all that well.
So, some background.
Back before it popularised the reality TV genre and doomed mankind, MTV was a force for good in the world if you can believe it. As well as playing music videos, MTV was a welcoming home for niche animation aimed at adults, including Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead, a show about the two stupidest characters in all of fiction.
One supporting character in this show was a classmate of Beavis (and also Butthead), Daria Morgendorfer, a bright, nerdy girl who acted as straight woman to the titular idiots’ antics. When two of the producers of Beavis and Butthead, Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn, were approached by MTV to create a show for girls, they asked Mike Judge if they could use Daria and he gave them permission. So, even though Mike Judge is technically Daria’s creator he had nothing to do with the series she is most famous for. Got all that? Okay.
The series opens with Daria moving with her family from Highland (where Beavis and Butthead is set) to Lawndale, Texas where the water is less irradiated and the animation is of slightly higher quality. Attending the local highschool with her vapid, far more popular younger sister Quinn, Daria navigates teen life in the nineties with the help of her sole friend Jane and the cynical outlook of a German existential philopsopher.
I never watched the show religiously, but I remember catching a few episodes here and there and really enjoying it. So why was I so unimpressed this time around, when I’m as easy a mark for nineties nostalgia as its possible to find? Well, let’s start with the animation. Because, no disrespect…
It’s definitely better than Beavis and Butthead, no question. But honestly, I’m not sure Beavis and Butthead wasn’t trolling the audience. I can see why Daria’s animation might be seen as charmingly lo-fi but coming back to it with fresh eyes it hits more like laziness. There’s also weird issues with perspective and scale. Massive doors, rooms the size of tennis courts.
But really I think the biggest issue is that it’s just not a particularly well written show. Every episode has at least one really good line but there’s also a lot of duds. Plenty of episodes feel like they don’t have enough plot. Scenes just end with a half-joke or sometimes nothing at all. It feels really….slack, is I think the word.
As for the characters, it breaks two very important rule of a good comedic ensemble.
- Everyone should be distinct.
- No one should be redundant.
There is a LOT of overlap here. Brittany the cheerleader sounds and acts more or less identically to Quinn. And even Daria and Jane’s scenes can sometimes sound like a schizophrenic having a conversation with her alter ego who is also exactly like her.
When I asked her, Spouse of Mouse made the point that a lot of shows from this era were never meant to be binged and I think that’s definitely a factor here. Put an episode of this in between Total Request Life and Pimp My Ride and I could definitely see it being a welcome reprieve. But watching one episode one after the other and you start to see that outside of good vibes there isn’t a lot of meat in the sandwich.
Okay, but there’s still good points, right? Sure there is! Overall, it’s a very good voice cast. Tracy Grandstaff’s dry, inflectionless “Wednesday Addams in suburbia” performance is justly iconic. And I have to factor in that I’m watching the DVD release which has none of the licenced music that the original broadcasts used (this is why this series took an absolute dog’s age to come to home media). The replacement music sounds fine to me (especially since I’d only seen one or two episodes of the original broadcast) but I have to imagine that it hurts the cool nineties vibe somewhat.
So why was Daria such a cultural touchstone for my generation? Well, this was a time when animation aimed at adults was still something of a rarity and female led animation aimed at adults was practically unheard of. The only other example I can think of is Aeon Flux and…how can I put this?
Daria was just a show about women hanging out, bitching about life and living a normal day to day existence. For its time, it was genuinely one of a kind.
So I don’t know if it holds up as a TV show in 2024. But that’s not really the point of nostalgia. I know, objectively, that for most of the nineties I was miserable and anxious and wanting to be anywhere else but school. But that’s not how the memories feel now.
Nostalgia isn’t about how things really were.
It’s about how things are now.
NEXT UPDATE: 06 February 2024
NEXT TIME: Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I’ll love ya! Tomorrow!
unshavedmouse 
I’m not a huge fan of this show, and I never watched it when it was new. But I watched many clips and a few whole episodes on the Internet a few years ago. What I found the most interesting is the contrast and sisterly rivalry between Daria and Quinn. It is really sad though that they both felt that they had to fullfil a role (smart but cynical and antisocial vs popular and pretty but seemingly brainless), when they could have been happier if they just found a middle ground…
I still love this show, but I agree it doesn’t work on a binge. The early episodes especially tended to be “Daria is in (situation), she snarks about how everyone is an idiot, and then is proven right”. Later on the writing got stronger, with actual arcs that could carry through episodes, and those hold up better.
One thing I’ll definitely give it through is that it more and more started challenging Daria’s viewpoint as it went along. To acknowledge that just snarking at everything didn’t actually improve her situation, that the adults could make good points, her sister wasn’t actually dumb, the popular kids weren’t all just conformist jerks. Daria in season 5 was a very different character than in season 1.
Though it does bother me that the teachers never really got to develop. Her parents did, but Mr. O’Neill (pathetic), Mr. DeMartino (furious), and Ms. Barch (misandrist) remained pretty one dimensional throughout. Ms. Li in particular was a petty corrupt tyrant from episode one, and just stayed that way. Shame, because most of the antagonistic characters, even ones like the Fashion Club, usually got an episode or two that humanized them, and challenged Daria’s initial assessment of who they were. Not so for the school staff, who just stayed as jokes, which justifies Daria’s low opinion of them even after the show started calling her out for acting like that.
I have heard good things but never actually seen it. This should be interesting. I am very much in that phase of life where I just want to rewatch my old nostalgic favorites, not experience new to me shows. The only Beevis and Buthead stuff I know is from the Arthur parody.
“So, even though Mike Judge is technically Daria’s creator he had nothing to do with the series she is most famous for. Got all that? Okay.”
I would think he at least some impact, like creating her.
“When I asked her, Spouse of Mouse made the point that a lot of shows from this era were never meant to be binged and I think that’s definitely a factor here. “
Yes, I often hear the people on reddit complaining about clip shows. Back when if you missed an episode you missed an episode those were wonderful ways to get caught up (and a way for the show to promote itself, and if it fails then there is no show anymore).
Great review.
And here I thought you were going to review the musical Annie for a moment. 😛
Oh, and despite growing up in the 80s and 90s, I have absolutely no feelings for Daria. To each their own. 🙂
Daria was one of those shows I never got into nor felt the need to get into, but one my older sisters really enjoyed. Maybe because I was more into fantastical animated shows rather than grounded ones. Maybe because I’m a guy and didn’t really understand the female perspective back then. Or maybe because I was a kid through most of the 90’s and not a teen. Either way, nostalgia isn’t always what it used to be.
Tomorrow Land huh? I sometimes forget that movie exists.
This is one of those shows that I never could get into, even though I tried. I watched every episode but never found myself loving it, so I can’t be mad at your feelings.
I honestly didn’t really get it when it came out , and it was as me problem , as ..look I was an absolute social outcast in that era of the 90s (I was a spotty metal head when that was deeply uncool in teenage Dublin , and people wanted to either be either cooler than thou Cure/Smiths/Indie fans or off their tits vicks inhaler and dummy wearing Ravers) , and while I loved the idiots from Beavis and Butthead, that weirdly I could sort of relate to , Daria just seemed to be a show about the cool kids doing cool kids things and whining about cool kids problems (even social pariah/Dariah seemed like one of cool kids to me back then) .
Watching it years later as an adult (having grown up , got into a million different genres and learned the zen art of “being popular ” was actually not giving a shit if you were popular or not, as it doesn’t really matter ) its actually a pretty great show .
Also if you’re talking about MTV animated shows , back then there was the “so extreme 90s it hurts!) The Maxx, and later celebrity DEathmatch , and the absolutely forgotten but I liked it at the time Undergrads. (I’ve literally just found out that Mission Hill wasn’t an MTV show , which is odd as it would fit this style perfectly)
Also preemptive Tomorrowland got Tron 3 cancelled!! rant It did really badly and for some reason that was enough for Disney to cancel any Tron plans they had at the time!
..and now instead of a sequel to the “amazing looking and perfectly scored by Daft Punk movie (even if the story was a bit rubbish) Masterpiece” that we would have gotten back then ..we’re getting Jarad Leto driving around angrily on a light cycle in New York , while NIN do angry industrial things in the background (its specifically Angry NIN , not thematic Reznor and Ross)
Wait, Mr Jared Leto played the villain in TOMORROWLAND? (I may actually have to watch that film now: Mr Leto has specific skills and almost all of them are better served when you’re allowed, nay, positively encouraged to boo & hiss at his character).
On a more serious note, I frequently find myself grappling with that same Nineties Lad Nostalgia* you mention above, Mouse: objectively they were just another decade and being able to able to enjoy them suggest no small amount of privilege on my part.
On the other hand the 21st Century took all of a year, nine months & eleven days to get nasty and just keeps getting more & more like something out of a JUDGE DREDD flashback sequence to date.
I’ve lived in five decades so far and lived through three of them, but so help me it’s sometimes difficult to see the charms in the last two.
*Lad as in ‘Innocent young lad’ not ‘Lad’s Mag’, be assured.**
**No kids, you don’t need to know and I in no way, shape or form encourage you to find out for yourselves (Unless you’re over the age of eighteen but not yet twenty-one).