Daria (TV series): Difference between revisions

The show ran on MTV for five seasons from March 3, 1997 to January 21, 2002. Glenn Eichler was given the option of half of a sixth season but he made the decision to conclude the series at the end of its fifth season. At four years and ten months, it became the longest-running animated series in MTV history, eclipsing the more popular ''Beavis and Butt-head'' by a few months. (''Daria'' would be the second-longest running MTV series if ''Celebrity Deathmatch'' is counted as an animated series.)

(There are now reports that MTV will be reviving the series with the tentative title of ''[[Daria & Jodie]]''. Please follow the wiki link for updates.)

Daria faces pressure on two fronts: from her very cute, very popular and very shallow sister [[Quinn Morgendorffer]] and her parents -- workaholic mother [[Helen Morgendorffer]] and father [[Jake Morgendorffer]], a clueless man with an unfortunately short fuse. Daria's parents want her to be more popular and more outgoing, a path which Daria rejects.

It appears that Daria will be a loner at Lawndale until she meets a similar soul in the form of artist [[Jane Lane]]. Daria (and Jane) respond to the events around them with dry humor, wit, and sarcasm, comments which go over the heads of their targets.

Daria, however, has people for whom she feels fondness other than Jane Lane. She finds herself attracted to [[Trent Lane]], a tall dark and handsome (and lazy) musician and Jane's older brother. As the seasons progress, Daria's patience with Trent's laziness ends but for the first few seasons of Daria, Trent is Daria's secret crush.

The closeness of Daria's relationship with Jane is threatened by Jane's new boyfriend, [[Tom Sloane]], whom Daria dislikes. Eventually, the two get used to each other and an attraction develops between the two. As Jane's relationship with Tom is failing, Daria and Tom become progressively more friendly until the two share a forbidden kiss in Tom's car. Daria tells Jane and the fallout nearly ends Daria's friendship with Jane, but somehow the friendship is repaired and Tom becomes Daria's boyfriend.

However, the Daria/Tom relationship is not meant to last, not surviving the final season. Daria breaks up with Tom in the final episode of the series, "[[Is It College Yet?]]" This episode has Daria and her classmates graduating Lawndale High School and going into separate ways. Daria and Jane will be going to separate colleges in the Boston area, ensuring that their very close friendship will last even after the end of the series.

A short animated pilot, "[[Sealed with a Kick]]", was created by with Karen Disher as production designer and Sam Johnson and Chris Marcil as writers. The pilot was never aired and was never intended to be a completed cartoon. The animated characters are not colored, with different voices for main characters (like Kevin). Disher's designs of the main characters would further change between the time of "Sealed with a Kick" and the airing of the first new episode, and some parts of the characters were altered: Daria became less proactive in the series, for example.

At the beginning of the fourth season, ''Daria'' was moved to Friday night, traditionally a poor night for television in the United States as Friday is the end of the work/school week and most people spend their evenings outside the home instead of watching TV. ''Daria'' was moved back onto Monday nights for its fifth and final season.

During the lifetime of the series, ''Daria'' was much more heavily promoted in its first three seasons than it its final two. Generally, episodes were rerun several times during the first three seasons whereas during the fifth season fans had to wait for marathons to take place in hopes of catching missed episodes, which were not rerun.

On the MTV USA web site, a section of the website was devoted to ''Daria''. MTV currently maintains a ''Daria'' website, although it hasn't been updated in years. To promote the DVD release of ''[[Daria: The Complete Animated Series]]'', MTV launched a new Daria website, featuring full video of season 1 episodes. The old ''Daria'' website remains on MTV.com.

New material on the website included interesting essays, in-character writing from the cast, and interesting facts not available from watching the show. For example, the full last names of Stacy and Tiffany were first revealed on the MTV Daria website on June 25, 1999. (An argument could be made that Tiffany's last name was revealed in "[[The Invitation]]," but the last name was not attributed to that character until the web site update.)

Annoyingly, the MTV Daria website did not archive its past material. When new content was added, old content would sometimes be removed. Old content can be occasionally found at by searching web archives or fandom sites.

The show was quickly found to be popular. In early 1998, ''The New York Times'' [http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/11/business/beavis-and-butt-head-s-feminine-side.html?scp=2&sq=Beavis%20and%20Butt-head&st=cse reported that] ''Daria'' was one of MTV's highest rated shows, with the network's manager Van Toffler viewing her as "a good spokesperson for MTV, intelligent but subversive", and that MTV had found most audiences responded well to the character. (One of the few audiences that didn't were 18-24 year old males.) The investment company Ehrenkrantz King Nussbaum credited ''Daria'' and ''Beavis and Butt-head'' as helping to fuel MTV's growth in the 1990s to a general entertainment network and to encourage other networks to make cartoons like ''South Park'' & ''King of the Hill''. [http://web.archive.org/web/20120417100449/http://outpost-daria.com/media_art19.html ''Teen Magazine''] readers voted Daria for the magazine's "Killer Cartoon" award in February 1999. In a later ''Times'' article [http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/27/tv/spotlight-daria-smart-alienated-and-dating.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm spotlighting ''Is It Fall Yet?''], MTV executive [[Abby Terkuhle]] attributed the success to how Daria "says things that most people just think"... and, from what his six year old daughter told him, because the characters "make fun of their parents".

When the show ended, G.J. Donnelly of ''TV Guide'' lamented, "I already miss that monotone. I already miss those boots. ... Even at its most far-fetched, this animated film approaches the teenage experience much more realistically than shows like ''Dawson's Creek''." On the same occasion, Emily Nussbaum [http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/01/requiem_for_daria.html wrote at ''Slate''] that "the show is biting the dust without ever getting the credit it deserved: for social satire, witty writing, and most of all, for a truly original main character". She particularly singled out for praise that all the characters were heading "to very different paths in life, based on their economic prospects", giving the show an ambiguous end; "[the finale is] a bit of a classic: a sharply funny exploration of social class most teen films would render, well, cartoonish."

Internet reviewer Doug Walker, aka the Nostalgia Critic/That Guy With The Glasses has cited this show [http://channelawesome.com/dougs-favorite-tv-shows-part-2/ as his favorite TV program]. He was conscious that this might seem "a really weird choice" since he doesn't often mention it in his content, but praises it for accurately reflecting high school and the students - "I ''knew'' these people, I grew up with these people" - as well as dealing with difficult teenage issues, reflecting the feel of the late 90s, and for showing that Daria's cynical attitude, while cathartic, was not always right. He also said that while he was worried it may have become dated, contemporary teenagers have told him that it hasn't and that "these people... are still around". He said that there were only three episodes he didn't like: [[Depth Takes a Holiday]], [[Daria!]] and [[Life in the Past Lane]], mainly for their irrelevancy.