I’ve always been a morning person. It’s a behavior that seems to get more and more pronounced with age, and I wake up ridiculously early. While I wouldn’t mind a normal sleep cycle, and while I think genetic engineering should be used to identify and eliminate the infomercial host gene, low-grade insomnia has allowed me to reconnect with one of my favorite series.
The N shows an hour of Daria at an ungodly hour of the morning. Daria originally aired on MTV. Since the show was intelligent and genuinely funny, MTV didn’t seem to have any idea what to do with it. It isn’t like they had any comparable programming to pair it with, since part of the pleasure of Daria was its jaundiced view of youth culture. Honestly, can shows like TRL and Daria peacefully coexist on one network? Probably not for long.
But it did run a respectable five seasons with two movies (Is It Fall Yet? and the series-capping Is It College Yet?). It was one of the rare television series that managed to hold onto its initial promise, and the quality of the writing rarely dipped. One could even argue that the whole run of the series could be viewed as a sort of televised novel, with incremental character development, credible and rewarding milestones, and a beginning, middle, and end. (It starts with Daria’s first day of school at Lanwdale High. It ends with her graduation.)
And Daria is a terrific character, despite her unsavory past with Beavis and Butthead. She’s a conscientious objector in the popularity wars, too smart and caustic and observant to take high school seriously. She’s an outcast who views her status as such as an inevitability rather than any kind of badge of honor. It beats the alternative (embodied by her aggressively shallow sister, Quinn), but it’s nothing she’s particularly proud of. And she does manage to make one good friend, fellow outcast and budding artist Jane Lane. (They meet in self-esteem class.)
One of the first episodes I saw on MTV was “The Misery Chick.” A Lanwdale alum dies unexpectedly during a return visit to campus. Shortly before his death, the jock hero manages to alienate, insult, or revolt everyone he comes across, and the repercussions of his passing are a lot more interesting than you might expect. Daria’s stock skyrockets. As daft cheerleader Brittany puts it, “I mean, you’re used to being all gloomy and depressed and thinking about bad stuff… So I thought that maybe you can give me some tips.” Jane puts it a bit more directly, characterizing the group think as follows: “When they say, ‘You’re always unhappy Daria,’ what they mean is, ‘You think Daria. I can tell because you don’t smile. Now this guy died and it makes me think and that hurts my little head and makes me stop smiling. So, tell me how you cope with thinking all the time, Daria, until I can get back to my normal vegetable state.'”
And the character arcs, while gradual, are really rewarding. Daria inches a bit out of her shell of irony and detachment. Quinn’s shallowness reveals itself to be at least partly a facade. (The sisters’ relationship is one of the highlights of the series, especially in later seasons.) Their parents, Jake and Helen, evolve as individuals and a couple. The cast is large and varied, and everyone gets nice moments. There’s a surprising amount of fiber for an animated series.
This is one of the few series I would actually buy on DVD, so naturally MTV hasn’t released it yet. They’ve made the two movies available, but not the regular season episodes. And while it’s nice that The N is airing this terrific show, it is kind of grating to see some of the edits they’ve made, either for content or for timing. (Seriously, it’s not that salty that you’d need to edit it in the first place, unless you were made paranoid by a draconian moral authority that… oh, wait. Never mind.)