Re: MTV's Daria Turns 25

[Ubiquitous]

tmc...@gmail.com wrote:

>TV's ultimate sardonic teen got her own show... just in time for pop culture to
>turn on her.
>
>POSTED BY JOE REID
>WEDNESDAY 3/2/2022 AT 3:00AM EST
>
>It's the '90s, and everything sucks.
>
>This isn't a sentiment that resonates in the 2020s, when things suck so hard and
>we're all wishing we could turn the clock back to a time before COVID and Obama
>and Putin and Facebook. Surely things were better then: the world was so simple!
>Also, we were all 25 years younger, which is surely just a coincidence. Which
>isn't to say that things in 1997 weren't actually better; this was the year that
>Titanic steamed its way into theaters, No Doubt topped the charts with "Don't
>Speak," and The Real World: Boston let children drink wine. But at the time it was
>incredibly of the moment to take a look around at the state of society and popular
>culture, roll your eyes, and declare yourself well and truly over it.
>
>And so on March 3, 1997, we got the premiere of MTV's Daria, a show that
>commemorated the spirit of principled disaffectation that had taken hold in the
>1990s. and which was mere moments away from going out of style.
>
>We can't talk about Daria without first talking about Beavis and Butthead, which
>in turn means remembering just how huge that show was when it came to defining MTV
>in the mid '90s. Birthed on the MTV animated shorts anthology Liquid Television,
>Beavis and Butthead debuted as a show in its own right in 1993 and quickly became
>one of MTV's most popular and visible series. The show, about two dim-bulb
>metalheads who sit around and watching (and commenting on) music videos all day,
>was accidentally a pretty apt show to transition MTV out of its all-music-video
>first decade and into an era where non-music programming - including The Real
>World, which had recently debuted - would take over more and more.
>
>Daria Morgendorfer was a classmate of Beavis and Butthead, and while she was often
>a foil for their dumba**ery, she never lost her cool in the face of their antics
>like so many of the show's other characters. When the idea came to spin Daria off
>into her own show, Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge didn't have anything to
>do with it, as he was busy working on King of the Hill at the time. Even when
>Beavis and Butthead was briefly revived on MTV in 2011, she wasn't part of the
>show, and in interviews Judge seemed vaguely hostile to the idea.
>
>The 1997 debut of Daria kicked off with Daria and her family having just moved to
>Lawndale, severing the tie with Beavis and Butthead pretty cleanly, never
>mentioning or even alluding to the pair again. We'd never seen anything of Daria's
>home life before, so the show's creators, Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn, were
>able to start with a blank canvas. With her pronounced monotone now perfected
>(Tracy Grandstaff voiced the character throughout the series, though that didn't
>stop persistent rumors that Daria was voiced by another of pop culture's
>definitional Gen X slackers, Janeane Garofalo), Daria dealt with every aspect of
>her life with a detached but withering derision.
>
>The opening credits gave us everything we needed to know about the show: Daria
>sitting stone-faced at the movies while the gathered masses laugh at the screen;
>Daria in gym class refusing to participate in volleyball; Daria with her family at
>the football game, stone-faced while everybody cheers; Daria decidedly unmoved at
>a wedding where everybody else is emotional. Daria's personality, reaching to the
>absolute extreme of Gen X antisocial posturing, was the joke of the show, but the
>show was clearly more on Daria's side than anyone else's.
>
>The premiere episode, "Esteemsters," sees Daria and her sister, the easily popular
>and effortfully cute Quinn, starting at a new school. Complete polar opposites,
>the sisters can't stand each other, though not in a way that seems to particularly
>vex either one of them. To Daria, Quinn is the epitome of everything she despises:
>a shallow trend-chaser with the world constantly falling at her feet. To Quinn,
>Daria is a cranky malcontent and, worse yet, a social liability. By the end of the
>first day, Quinn has already ensconced herself in Fashion Club, while Daria gets
>diagnosed by the school psychologist with low self-esteem.
>
>Many of the Daria trademarks were there right off the bat. Daria being smarter
>than her teachers, for one. Daria's parents - her proto-Lean In mom and chipper
>yet perpetually overstressed dad - are also pretty much fully formed. While in
>remedial self-esteem class (the '90s were obsessed with self-esteem, truly don't
>ask), Daria meets and quickly befriends the iconic Jane Lane, who matches Daria's
>withering disdain for everything while also looking like the coolest Alternative
>Nation VJ imaginable.
>
>If Daria had been made today, its title character would have been discoursed to
>death with armchair diagnoses of everything from autism spectrum to post-traumatic
>stress disorder from having to move at such an impressionable age. In 1997,
>though, Daria was just a moody teen whose vibe tracked with a lot of what mid-'90s
>kids were picking up from the musicians and movies of the time.
>
>What's especially fascinating about Daria's 1997 premiere is that the show became
>a touchstone for a culture that was just about to cede its supremacy. Gen X
>slacker culture was on the precipice of giving way to Quinn-style pop. Two days
>before Daria premiered, the Spice Girls hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with
>"Wannabe." In less than three months, Hanson's "MMMBop" would do the same. One
>month later, the Backstreet Boys' "Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)" would debut
>on the charts. Daria would run for five seasons, finally ending in 2001, but while
>many remember it as a show that was emblematic of the cultural mood of its era, it
>served more as an elegy for it. Daria was the show that pop-averse post-grungers
>and alterna-teens clung onto while MTV was increasingly focused Justin Timberlake
>and Britney Spears - a couple whose good looks and easy popularity matched
>Lawndale golden couple and Daria nemeses Kevin and (ahem) Brittany. Daria was
>ultimately never defined by being the dominant culture but by being aggressed by
>it. She was a relic of a bygone era, even if that era was never further than 24
>months in the past.

Wow, has it been 25 years already?

Wasn't there talk about a revival or slomething?

--
Let's go Brandon!

[Micky DuPree]

tmc...@gmail.com writes:

> https://www.primetimer.com/features/its-somehow-been-25-years-since-daria-debuted

Lah la LAH la lah.

-Micky