I get the feeling every time I watch MTV’s Daria. And the realism is spooky.

For those of you unfamiliar with MTV’s answer to Lisa Simpson, Daria is an animated spin-off of Beavis & Butt-head. The show, which debuted in 1997, is based around the struggles of Daria Morgendorffer, a sardonic high school student. Permanently dressed in combat boots and a green blazer, she is trapped within the confines of Lawndale, a cookie-cutter town where SUVs roam free, every home has three stories, and affluence counts the way neatness used to.

While Lawndale is contrived and superficial, Lawndale High is downright insufferable. Aside from her best friend, Jane, and her boyfriend, Tom, Daria labors through each day among her emotional and intellectual inferiors.

Shallowness is par, and nowhere is this better represented than among the members of the Fashion Club, a trite organization of junior girls whose mission is to ’stop the vertically challenged from wearing really fat stripes, point out icky fibers to icky fiber wearers, and fight frosted shadows “” Giving this scenario an ironic twist that Daria probably appreciates on some level, her image-obsessed sister, Quinn, is the group’s secretary. So it’s easy to see why Daria’s eyelids are always half-lowered, her brown eyes cast disinterestedly left or right.

Despite Daria (and Quinn’s) eagerness to label herself an outcast, we, the enlightened viewers, know Daria represents the Uber-Cool. She disregards other people’s opinions the way we all wanted to when we were in high school, and she does it with such aplomb that she seems sincerely happy in her own funky state of suspended amusement. 

Aside from the happiness part, all this contributes to a profound suspicion: I am a graduate of Lawndale High.

Put it this way, when I was a senior, THE car to have was a hunter green Jeep Cherokee. Kids would sneak up behind you and check the label of your shirt, then shout it out if, heaven forbid, it was something like Jordache or Z-Caverichi. You may have already guessed that I was on the short end of all this.

I remember one particularly horrifying moment. I had gone school shopping with my mom the previous night because J.C. Penny’s (bad start) was having a sale. After some rooting around, I found what I considered to be, by far, the coolest pair of jeans ever made by human hands. They were extra-acid washed and, check this, the back pockets were dyed neon green, while the tops of the front ones were highlighted in pink. Man, were they cool. I was a little overweight, but these pants were gonna make up for everything.

Of course, I wore them the next day. I walked into English after most of the class had arrived but before the teacher. Heads turned so fast I might as well have been naked. Quinn (no, not really Quinn, but a fellow classmate whose name, conveniently, rhymes with Quinn) took charge. "Ohmygod!" she shouted. "What are you? Some sort of walking faux pas? Call the fashion police, quick!"

I kid you not. This really happened. I was dumbstruck, and not just because I didn’t know what "faux pas" meant. How could I have been so wrong, so thoroughly misguided? Without a word, without anything resembling think-what-you-want-I-don’t-care defiance, I slunk to my chair.

Watching Daria nowadays is like reliving that and kindred moments over again and again. Only now I’m Daria-cool, and I say something like: "No, not the fashion police ” their khaki prison uniforms burn my skin.” Nothing like sweet, albeit 10-years-too-late vindication.

For five seasons now, Daria has been championing the similarly disenfranchised. In a 1999 interview with Anita Gates of The New York Times, series co-creator Glenn Eichler said, "Apparently everyone, with the exception of a very few people who were hit on the head when they were very young, felt like they were outsiders. You either identify with her as an outsider or you sort of envy her ability to navigate her life as an outsider and stay sane."

Curiously, this identification frequently occurs outside common-sense demographic patterns. While your average twenty-something female professional might have a hard time finding worth in the monosyllabic grunts of Beavis and Butt-head, twenty-something guys just love Daria, maiden of angst. That isn’t to say she would have been their fantasy date back in high school — not that Daria would have dated them anyway — but they now realize she would have been the most fun.

Daria’s equal appeal has its origins in the show’s greatest asset — its writing. Sam Johnson, a veteran Daria writer, makes it sound easy.

"I feel that as an adult I began to identify really closely with what it must be like to be a disenfranchised teenage girl ” Professional comedy writers are a lot like teenagers. We all suspect that it’s the good-looking people who get ahead in life. We’re also a little concerned that maybe we’re smarter than everyone else," Johnson said in a 1998 interview with Alex Kuczynski, also of The New York Times.

It’s not a gender thing; it’s a once-on-the-outside-am-I-always-on-the-outside kinda thing. Dig? 

The writers also are willing to take on adults who haven’t outgrown the best, like, years of their lives. In a 1999 episode titled "The Lost Girls,” Daria is visited by Val, the editor of Val, a YM-esque magazine built around exploiting teenage angst and confusion. Val prides herself on getting the whole 17-going-on-27 thing down and looks forward to finding a kindred spirit in Daria.

You might be thinking all of this is just fine and dandy but that Daria is nothing new. After all, Lisa Simpson has been quietly raging against the machine since 1989, and, for the most part, has done it with a smile on her face and a genuine concern for others. So why should such a self-avowed Simpsons fan (i.e., me) make such a big deal over Daria? Because Daria has a wicked honesty, a take-no-prisoners attitude she dishes out freely to her peers and elders that Lisa can’t touch. She even has the temerity to go after The Man.

Here’s an example. No doubt Daria bristles when she’s compared to her three-fingered, yellow, mainstream (how about that, I just called Fox mainstream) counterpart. Fortunately, MTV has provided Daria fans with the ultimate in Daria commentary, in the form of several essays listed under "The World According to Daria," on MTV’s Daria homepage.

Defending her right to be a "positively negative role model," in contrast to Lisa’s perky optimism, Daria writes on teenage sex, "” my sex life has been very limited. Truth be told, it’s more in deference to our animation budget, which only has enough money in it for getting to first base. Meanwhile that lucky Lisa Simpson gets to do it all she wants." Now I love the Simpsons, but that’s funny.

Sadly, Daria is reportedly ending after this, its fifth and final season. Half the show’s season is already over. May is when production takes a midseason break, though new episodes will resume sometime in late June. Personally, I’m going to catch each one. High school was tough and I need all the absolution I can get.

Enter the Pop Forum
Does pop culture get high school right?

Related Sites
Visit Outpost-Daria.com for a guide to characters, episodes, fan fiction and more. Daria’s official MTV site is here.
PBS has been showing episodes of the documentary American High, which Rolling Stone called: "A show about the harshest bit of surviving most of us ever have to do: high school."
From PopPolitics, Alicia Thompson writes that unlike Buffy, Xena or Scully, the genetically-engineered heroine of Fox’s Dark Angel is more about sex than superpower.