Back in the late 90s, when MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head had reached dizzying heights of sniggering virality, one of its ancillary characters – a bespectacled teenage girl named Daria – somehow got a spin-off. If Beavis and Butt-Head was Cheers, Daria was its Frasier.
“I was the only female writer at the time on Beavis and Butt-Head,” says Tracy Grandstaff, whose fantastically dry delivery brought Daria Morgendorffer to life. “We’re all sitting in the writers’ room. Because we had zero money, they’d ask me to go into the booth and voice various characters.”
But how was she paid – as a writer, or voice actor? “I don’t believe I got paid for it!” she laughs. “It was just free labour in the booth. I was affordable!”
When MTV asked for a female-centric spin-off to their biggest hit, Daria rose to the challenge. Its titular heroine is an intelligent, misanthropic and extremely relatable teen whose bedroom is a literal padded cell. “I honestly think that’s the externalisation of her internal trauma,” says Grandstaff. “The only thing that makes sense to her is Jane!”
Jane Lane, of course, is Daria’s best friend and kindred spirit, an artist and laconic wit. The two girls deal with peer pressure, social issues, and the kinds of hormonal nightmares universal to every teen.
“We’ve all been in high school, right?” says Jane’s voice actor, Wendy Hoopes. “We’ve all had parents! High school is hard. It’s filled with angst for everyone.”
Daria must also contend with her deeply eccentric family: her father, Jake, mother, Helen, and sister Quinn (the latter two are also voiced by Hoopes). And like all teenage problems, these obstacles seem both wearying and powerfully urgent.
“That’s the thing about high school angst: it’s new. Right? It’s all happening for the first time,” Hoopes says. “It’s profoundly enormous; the smallest incident can feel like a 900lb gorilla … or it can make you feel completely elated. The cynicism of someone like Daria is mature, but I think it also exists because we’re all discovering in high school what our own personal existentialism is.”
Daria and Jane’s friendship, fallings-out, their love for one another and their disdain for the system they’re trapped in feel all too familiar. “It’s relatable for people who, like myself in high school, just didn’t quite understand what the rules were,” muses Grandstaff. “People who saw what it really meant to be popular, and not really wanting that!”
When she laughs, she sounds eerily like Daria. “It always felt like you had to compromise a lot of dignity. And even to this day, I meet people who are just looking for their Jane. A sounding board, a person that gets them, doesn’t judge them, calls them out on their shit. Who makes things more fun.”
The show ends with Is It College Yet?, a special which sees Daria and Jane finally graduate from high school. As Daria stands at a podium and delivers her speech, she sums up the show’s entire ethos with a dizzying fusillade: “Stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong. Remember: when the emperor looks naked, the emperor is naked; the truth and a lie are not ‘sort of the same thing’; and there is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can’t be improved with pizza. Thank you.”
It’s criminal that Daria hasn’t returned in some iteration. In 2017, Daria co-creator Susie Lewis and character designer Karen Fisher imagined where the characters would be in present day. Daria ends up writing on a late night show in New York, and Jane becomes an artist in New York.
Is Daria’s adult profession a nod to Grandstaff’s own? “Yeah!” she says. “Daria would be writing on The Daily Show. She’d be writing for someone who is the voice of reason and sanity in what is otherwise literally happening right now.”
Both Grandstaff and Hoopes are enthusiastic about the idea of Daria returning. “Of course we’d come back!” Hoopes says. “We were peaking right when we ended. So I think a follow-up would be super fun.”
There are so many directions a Daria sequel could go: a Spinal Tap style mockumentary following Trent and his band? Daria navigating the writers strike? A Sick Sad World special on Jane’s avant garde art career? I pitch all of these at Hoopes, who insists on sharing them with Eichler. I tell her I’ll hold her to that. Suddenly, it’s not Hoopes on the phone any more – it’s Quinn, her high-pitched voice sounding exactly as it does in the show: “Oh my God, that would be so great! We would really appreciate it. And Paul?”
Yes, Quinn?
“I’m always thinking,” she assures me.
Daria is available to stream on Paramount Plus. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
