Last year Pluto TV made me slightly happier when they introduced a new "Comedy Central Animation" channel that also featured a couple of old MTV series from the 90s: Beavis and Butt-Head and its spin-off, Daria. The former had been shown sometimes on the "Guy Code" channel but the latter had not been anywhere since Hulu stopped streaming it at some point. I own the series on DVD but it was still nice to be able to watch random episodes.
The premise of the show is that highly intelligent cynic Daria Morgendorffer and her family move to the suburban town of Lawndale. Daria's mother is a successful lawyer who struggles to balance work and parenting. Daria's father is a high-strung marketing consultant who isn't extremely bright. And Daria's younger sister Quinn is a self-absorbed freshman who's instantly popular with boys and joins a few other snooty, narcissistic girls in "The Fashion Club."
Watching the show again in 2020-2021, it became clear how pretty much all the "problems" are what we'd call #FirstWorldProblems. A lot of the episodes revolve around Daria's not fitting in with other students and her strict moral code that causes her to butt heads with teachers, administrators, other adults, and her parents. In the first couple of seasons there's also her crush on her friend's twentysomething loser musician brother Trent and in the last season or two she gets a boyfriend named Tom.
As a social outcast I always enjoyed the show, but when I watch it now it seems kind of quaint. "Problems" like difficult school assignments or whether or not to get contact lenses or that old people at a nursing home don't like her voice when she reads to them or the struggle to get into the college of her choice seem pretty minor when you think of today with Covid, gun rampages, cyberbullying, and so on. In the show the school's principal Ms. Lee is seen as paranoid for wanting metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs, but it turns out that she was just ahead of the curve. If anything in today's world we'd probably think she's not safety-conscious enough. Even the token black students, class president Jody and her jock boyfriend Mac, don't face open racism from other students, but there are a couple of times where Jody experiences more thinly-veiled racism from adults, like when for a class assignment she and Daria have to apply for a small business loan and she gets turned down until she mentions her wealthy father.
In that quaintness there is a nostalgia for when things were a lot simpler, when your "problems" weren't life-and-death like they are these days. If they rebooted the show for today's audience, Daria would be crusading against the "fake news" being peddled on social media and lapped up by her dumber classmates. Quinn and the Fashion Club would probably be trolling and fat-shaming girls online and telling girls like Daria to kill themselves. Jody and Mac would probably get a lot more harassment from fellow students. And Ms. Lee would have to be even more like a prison warden.
It's kind of depressing to think about. Anyway, that's not to say there weren't real problems for a lot of young people in the 90s, but it was easier to be a sheltered suburban or country kid than it is today.
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