Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Writer: Neena Beber
Original Air Date: March 24, 1999
Watch It On: Amazon Prime Instant Video
What It’s About: Mr. O’Neill submits Daria’s essay, the incredibly ’90s-titled “My So-Called Angst,” to Val Magazine. When the essay wins the Win a Day With Val contest, the thirtysomething editrix Val (surprise) shows up in Lawndale full of exuberance and “edge.” While her classmates fawn over Val and gleefully respond to her celebrity name-dropping, Daria barely hides her derision for the media maven and ultimately takes her down a peg.
Why It’s So Good: Sometimes it astounds me that Daria was on MTV in the late ’90s, a period in which the channel began to focus less on music coverage and more on its original programming — particularly reality series. By then, when I was in high school, MTV seemed to be focusing on things that I was not interested in — that is, except for Daria, which was a saving grace for an awkward, lonely, somewhat weird outcast like I was. Now, I’m not going to be too wide-eyed and idealistic here; Daria was, after all, selling something, too, but the idea that the protagonist of the series was a sarcastic, sullen teenager who spoke in a monotone and didn’t fit in with her classmates (and didn’t particularly care to, either) was revolutionary for me.
What I love about “The Lost Girls” is that is seems to exemplify the powerful messages that Daria was setting forth. It’s very obvious that the episode completely lampoons Jane Pratt, the founding editor of ’90s staples Sassy and Jane (and, later, the very popular website xoJane). Val is a narcissist and an opportunist, a woman who is on a mission to find out as much as she can about current youth culture, appropriate it despite her being well beyond the age bracket of her audience and fans, and then sell it back to them with a sense of faux authority. She is the kind of woman who would call herself a feminist in addition to a trendsetter, but the trends she propagates have less to do with equality and empowerment and more to do with consumerism — focusing on nail polish, popularity, and dating rather than self-assurance. She’d argue that beauty and cosmetics are self-empowering, when, in reality, those are simply ways in which people can make money off of those who think such superficialities are necessary.
Daria (both the show and the character) sees through all of this, of course, and completely take the piss out of everything that Val (and, of course, Jane Pratt) stand for. At the end of the episode, Daria lays a massive truthbomb on her when Val realizes that Daria isn’t as cool and popular as she had hoped when she read her essay. “What do you mean, pushing yourself as some kind of role-model when all you care about is how you look and what celebrities you know?” she asks Val. “Aren’t teenage girls screwed up enough without you foisting your shallow values on them and making their lousy self images even worse?”
It’s quite something that this show existed alongside, say, The Grind, but it’s nice to remember that for one brief moment MTV was actually producing something that expressed an actual counterculture rather than promoting the status quo filtered through a corporate media lens.
The Best Moment: Daria’s father is up in arms about the concept of “edge” after Val repeatedly drops the term (and its variation, “edgy”) to describe nearly everything. When he asks what “edgy” means, Daria replies, “As far as I can make out, ‘edgy’ occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy — not to mention the spending money — out of the ‘youth culture.’ So they come up with this fake concept of seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan.”
Photos: MTV
