Reihan Salam reviews MTV’s Daria, which just came out on DVD, and explains that it got the misfits right, but it got the popular kids right, too:
Daria centers on the adventures of Daria Morgendorffer, a keenly observant young woman who has little patience for the idiocies and indignities that define life at her drearily conventional suburban high school in the fictional town of Lawndale. At first, this provided plenty of fodder for cheap shots at the high-school establishment. Yet over the subsequent seasons, culminating in the brilliant TV movie Is It College Yet?, Daria became something different.
Rather than worship its all-knowing alternateen protagonists, the series humbled them, persuading them to let their guard down, open themselves to new experiences, and question their gut instincts. In the process, Daria became the greatest work of young adult fiction since the cave paintings at Lascaux.