Here's one from my youth (1997-2002) that I've been looking to revisit and see in full for a while now. Daria is probably a show you all remember catching on MTV now and again. You remember deadpan Daria and her popular little sister Quinn, and Quinn's fashion club friends. You remember the dumb-as-doornails quarterback-cheerleader couple of Kevin and Britney, right? And Jane? And Jane's brother Trent? And Daria's successful but overstressed parents? I remember! Anyway, I have no idea what night this show aired on, or during what stretch of the year, and I never did; this was just one of those shows that must have aired reruns before or after TRL or something.
Now, right off the bat, there's a huge component missing from Daria on DVD, and it's the ten or twelve different tracks that played per twenty-minute episode. Seriously, every scene in Daria started out with five seconds or so of a then-new single - a "brand-spankin' new" one I'm sure, remember those MTV intro bumpers? - that always seemed to fit the scene perfectly. Everything from Guster to Blink-182 to Train to Jay-Z to Ricky Martin to Jennifer Lopez was used to set the scene, which makes perfect sense since this was a show about high school on MTV. Sadly, the music licensing costs associated with bringing samples of more than 500 different songs to a DVD set was just prohibitively expensive, and Daria must live on with generic fill-in background tracks instead. Oh well!
Five seasons, sixty-five episodes, and two made-for-TV movies. This wasn't a quick undertaking, and I've been working on it on and off since August or September. Sometimes, going back and revisiting an old show is a bad idea. Hindsight tends to shade things with a certain rose color, and they're often best left that way. But I'm glad I went back this time and saw Daria from start to finish. The show started out slow, content for a season or two just to let its heroine be a sarcastic wallflower passing snide deadpan judgment on everyone around her - her family, her teachers, her classmates. (Yes, jocks are dumb. Yes, it girls are vapid. No, parents just don't understand. We get it, MTV!) But over the course of five seasons - and in the final two in particular - there was some real character progression and growth. The show finally let Daria lose her cool once or twice, showing she was only human after all. In the fifth season, she has a boyfriend - Tom - and the relationship brings out all kinds of new anxieties and unwanted feelings from Daria. Hell, in the final episode, she greets her old friend Jane with a sentimental hug after a rough day, and Jane's face is as full of surprise and concern as the viewer's could be after five years of seeing Daria barely so much as crack a smile or raise her voice.
The series ends with an hour-long movie called "Is It College Yet?" where all the kids apply to college, and I think it's a suitable end note. It paid service to most of the major characters, sending them off in various directions that made sense. And you can't help but feel like, as much of a wallflower as Daria was, she's going to do just fine in college and the world outside it.
And lastly, just because the casting is spot on (I mean who else would play Daria?) here's a mock trailer from CollegeHumor for a Daria ten-year reunion movie.
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