Thursday, June 27, 2013

Daria: The Most Realistic High School on TV


I hate teen dramas. HATE THEM. With a fiery passion. To paraphrase the film Scott Pilgrim “If Teen Dramas had a face I would punch it.” Most teenage dramas fall under the category of what I like to call “pretty people with problems.” Not a single one of these shows ever bore any resemblance to what I felt high school was like. Except for Daria. Ironically the show that I felt best-captured reality was a cartoon.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Daria was a spinoff of Beavis and Butthead that aired on MTV in the mid and late nineties. The main concept of the show revolved around titular teenager Daria Morgendorfer who moved to the small suburb of Lawndale with her family; Daria’s workaholic mother Helen, her addle brained yet eager to succeed father Jake, and her fashioned obsessed sister Quinn who usually pretends Daria is some sort of cousin or complete stranger living in her home.

From the very first episode, it is obvious that Daria does not fit in with the other students at her school. She is far smarter than most of them and has little to no interest in the social activities that the rest are obsessed with. Welcome to exactly how I felt in high school. While I may not have actually BEEN smarter than many of my fellow classmates, I certainly felt it. And as such I did not want to interact with many of them. So for me, Daria was very much my peer.

But it is more than just the way Daria interacts with the world around her. It is also the other characters that populate her world. Her parents are self-absorbed and usually do not have time for her problems, a feeling that many teenagers have about their parents. Her best friend and her sibling seem to have an easier time being social than she does. Her teachers are both impressed by her intelligence and yet frustrated by knowing she is smarter than they are while hating the job they feel trapped in (I knew way too many teachers like that).

Even though Daria is a cartoon, the show rarely takes advantage of this fact and show anything outrageously over the top or cartoonish. Everything about the premise and episodes is grounded completely in reality. There are a few episodes with dream sequences and one bizarre episode where Daria goes to a HS for teenage Holidays (yes, Holidays, embodiments of Christmas, Halloween, St. Patrick’s day, etc.) but those were the rare exceptions. For the most part, the bizarre imagery shown in the show was usually just a reflection of the character’s inner thoughts, which for most people can usually be pretty bizarre. So even when the show is imaginary, it still seems more real than most shows on television.

And in a bizarre twist for a teenage drama, Daria is portrayed as growing throughout the course of the series. That is, she becomes a more accepting character, gains a boyfriend, and even receives the acknowledgement from her sister that she is in fact her sister. The cracks in her sarcastic armor break and expand. She’s still the character we love, but with a slightly less bleak outlook on things, which in many ways is why so many people love the character. While we identify with her negativity, we hope things will work out for her.

Like High School, Daria came to an end, making way for such important MTV shows like Road Rules vs. Real World Challenge (and one day, Jersey Shore). While I wish the show had gone on forever, a part of me dreads to think how the show would change as its audience changed and the drive for ratings would force Daria into new and wackier situations. Right now, the show is timeless. All though it aired more than a decade ago, I’m sure high school students today could see a similarity between this show and their academic life.

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