Just renewing my acquaintance with the delightful Daria through this pair of video collections, the forming including "Cafe Disaffecto", "Malled", "This Year's Model" and "Lab Brat", and the latter being made up of "Arts 'N' Crass", "Fair Enough" and "Through A Lens, Darkly". I came across the show on tv back in high school and (television never having been a big part of my life) probably only watched about a dozen or so episodes, maybe twenty at tops, but the impression it left was deep nonetheless.
Returning now (a couple of these episodes seem familiar, but I think most are wholly new to me), I'm surprised by how gentle the humour is, but therein, I suppose, lies much of the show's charm - Daria and Jane may be teenage desaffectées par excellence, but for all their sarcasm and negativity neither is truly sad or angry, and both remain wired into the rest of the world to a very large extent. On the flip side, many characters who could've been unremittingly obnoxious (Kevin and Brittany, say, or Quinn and the rest of Daria's family) instead come across as basically sympathetic albeit on a different planet from Daria herself...it's not as dark as Ghost World, say, or, for that matter, real life - despite their differences, everyone more or less gets along in Daria's world (well, for a given value of 'more or less', anyway). But it's that sugarcoating which makes the show go down so sweetly.
