Daria S01xE01 Esteemsters
1. Thesis
If I claim, as I do, that Daria is one of the great TV shows, I’d better have an elevator pitch ready for why I feel that way. So here it is: Daria has some of the most realistic relationships of any high school show ever written. All of the classic relationships (teen vs. family, teen vs. adult, teen vs. teen, and teen vs. self) are explored, and the teen’s world is observed with a respectful but pragmatic eye. The relationships are neither overdramatized nor underplayed, the stakes are always both real and realistic. And what’s impressive about Esteemsters, the series premiere, is that the relationships which will underlie the entire series are established so deftly that the main characters all feel lived in. Every character in Daria carries their past with them, and this is the case from the very first scene.
2. Recap
Short (This is where I’m going to simply copy and paste from the liner notes I wrote for my personal Daria DVD box set. If you know the show, this will remind you which episode this is. If you don’t know the show, read the Long recap instead):
It’s the first day of school for Daria and Quinn, who have just moved with their parents to Lawndale from Highland.
Long
Jake drives Daria and Quinn to their first day of school, while awkwardly encouraging Daria to make friends. Naturally, Quinn makes new friends literally the moment she steps out of the car.
Inside Lawndale High, Ms. Li informs the new students that they need to take a psychological exam, with which Quinn (after being assured she will not be graded) participates with alarming enthusiasm. Daria, on the other hand, answers only to show her disrespect for the test, its administrator (who repeatedly calls her “Dara”), and psychiatric testing in general.
Mr. DiMartino introduces Daria to her history class. She correctly answers his questions about manifest destiny, which is more than any of her classmates (notably Kevin and Brittany) can do.
At dinner that evening, Quinn relates her many social successes, including her new position as vice president of the Fashion Club. Daria’s parents continue to encourage her to make friends, and she continues to fend them off with ironic quips. The school calls to inform them that Daria will have to take a special self-esteem class. The class is taught by Mr. O’Neill (if reading a prepared syllabus out loud counts as “teaching”). Fellow student Jane Lane introduces herself to Daria with some dry humor, and afterwards they walk home together. Jane has taken the self-esteem class six times.
At this point, the setting and main characters have all been established, so I’ll sum up the rest of the episode: Daria’s family (mainly her mother) attempt to raise her self-esteem through family activities, specifically: clothes shopping, “Pizza Forest” (a thinly veiled Chuck E. Cheese), and a UFO convention. Meanwhile, Daria and Jane decide to test out of self-esteem class (a simple enough task), but are forced to be publicly congratulated for their self-esteem at a school assembly.
3. Recapitulation
Let’s see how the classic relationships I mentioned are explored in this episode (I’m saving teen vs. family for part 4)
Daria’s relationship with the non-familial adults in her life is one of quiet disrespect. She uses her intelligence to express her independence without being insubordinate, and without ever getting in any real trouble. And yet, she never has the angles figured out quite so much as she thinks she does. She’s no Ferris Bueller. In fact, she’s in many ways the anti-Ferris. The authorities she tweaks are no more deserving than Ben Stein or Jeffrey Jones, but Daria never fundamentally denies their authority. And unlike Ferris (or Bluto, Spicoli, etc…) things rarely go quite how she plans. In this episode we see her seemingly “win” the psychological exam by exposing its pointlessness. But her only reward is attendance at a mandatory self-esteem class. And when she pulls her good student rank to force her way out of that class (a maneuver with which this writer is very familiar), she is still required to abase herself at a school assembly.
Daria’s relationship with other teens is not explored as deeply in this episode (Kevin and Brittany don’t offer much to relate to.) However, we do see her strike up a friendship with Jane, in a way that on both sides is almost accidental. Neither of them wants a friend (or at least they don’t think they do), but the attraction they feel to a kindred mind is one they can’t ignore. We also see some interesting aspects of Quinn’s relationship with her peers. Particularly striking is her position at the school assembly: seated between two boys, neither of whom she appears to like, and both of whom are staged so as to be visibly invading her personal space. While in future episodes, Quinn will never again be shown in quite so subservient a position, her relationship with boys will continue to display this contradiction: that, for somebody who spends so much time and energy talking about boys, she doesn’t really seem to enjoy their company.
After one episode, Daria’s character has already changed, which brings us to teen vs. self. Three times in this episode, Daria partakes in a “family activity” to raise her self-esteem. The first, clothes shopping, is unilaterally decided upon by her mother. The second time around, she’s managed to talk her way into making the decision herself, and decides to drag her family to Pizza Forest. Not because she has any desire to go there herself, but simply because she wants to punish her family for allowing her to manipulate them. But the UFO convention is different. Daria actually wants to go there. The fact that her family won’t like it is an added bonus, sure, but Daria is finally doing something for her own benefit. And this change will hold up over the course of the series (good riddance, Pizza Forest!). The irony of all this, of course, is that Daria actually gains self-esteem from her pointless self-esteem class.
As does Jane, and for the same reason: they found each other there. The joint decision to leave self-esteem class for a new shared existence of Sick Sad World and UFO conventions is a turning point in both characters’ lives. And like all the turning points we blunder through in adolescence, it goes largely unnoticed by both. After all, when you bond over a lack of interest in bonding, it can be easy to miss what’s going on. That uncertainty will linger throughout the series, because a small part of each teen actually resents their new friend, for taking away the autonomy and safety that a life of solitude provides. That resentment will rear its ugly head from time to time for years to come.
4. Closeup
The first scene of the first episode, of any series, carries a big burden, which is why I chose it for this closeup. Well, that and the fact that it’s just so well executed. The scene is a short one, less than a minute, and simply consists of Jake driving Daria and Quinn to school. The primary goal of this scene is to establish the basic premise: the family just moved, and Daria is starting out at a new high school. And it succeeds at that, but it also manages to show us so much more. Daria’s parents worry about her, and tell her so, but do not worry about Quinn (nor are they shy about criticizing Daria in front of her sister). Neither sister respects the other, in a passive-aggressive way, but they are united in their disrespect for their father, and understandably so. He is uncertain, ineffectual, and clearly not the primary breadwinner. We learn that their mother has a demanding (and apparently well-compensated) job, as well as an active interest in her children, and that she feels no compunction about using her husband as a delivery boy for her messages to her daughters. We learn that no family member can communicate honestly with any other, and the slightly different reasons why that is the case for each of them: Daria resents her parents for pushing her to fit into the system, and Quinn for doing it so effortlessly. Quinn resents Daria for her refusal to fit in, and her parents for not seeing that Daria has no intention of changing. Jake is painfully aware of his lack of authority, and has no idea how to overcome that. Some shows give themselves a full episode in their “old” setting before dropping their characters in the new. Within 30 seconds, Daria has told you everything you need to know about its main characters, where they have come from, and where they are going.
5. Bullet points!
-I’m worried I’m going to undersell the humor in this series, simply because jokes don’t need much analysis. But it can be a very funny show, and is particularly strong with its comedic timing. The Sick Sad World episode we see here may be the funniest one in the entire series, and the interview with Artie (who I’m fairly sure we’ll see again) at the UFO convention makes me laugh out loud every time I watch it (“They pressed my pants. Did a nice job.”)
-Both the psychologist and Mr. O’Neill fail to remember Daria’s name. It occurred to me as I watched that failure to remember names is a bit of a motif on this show, I’ll keep an eye on it.
-One fair criticism of this show is that some of its lines seem to want to be Statements About Life, in a way they don’t quite earn. (This is often signaled with a zoom from off-center onto Daria’s face.) Daria’s “I have low self-esteem for everybody else” is pretty solid, but some of the lines from her parents land with a bit of a thud.
-I find myself using the word “teens” to describe the characters a lot, because neither “girls” nor “women” (nor “guys” nor “people”) seems appropriate. I like to think that Daria and Jane would have understood the ironic-yet-not way in which I use the term.
-One sad aspect of the official DVD release is that essentially all of the music cues were replaced with generic royalty-free filler. This is completely understandable, as the show used contemporary tracks by big-name artists as transition music (this was back when MTV still cared about maintaining a relationship to music), but didn’t negotiate any DVD rights for those tracks because nobody’d yet heard of such a thing. If you’re curious, you can find out what you’re missing at http://web.archive.org/web/20120512035707/http://www.outpost-daria.com/song_list_1.html, which is an archived version of a song list from the fansite Outpost Daria, which I just this moment found out went offline a few months ago. I’m really bummed out now, as I spent a lot of time on this site back in the day, and in fact it is where I downloaded the images I used on my own personal Daria box set, as well as a starting point for the recaps in my liner notes. I would really urge you to click through that link and explore the archived version of the site, both as a nostalgia trip for the internet of 10+ years ago (I’m fairly certain there are some links to Angelfire sites in there), and an introduction to what was at the time a thriving fandom community. (See also: http://www.dariawiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Daria_fandom)
-I’ve used the word premiere, rather than pilot, in this recap, as Esteemsters is NOT the pilot episode. The actual pilot of this episode is essentially an animated storyboard, in black and white (included in my handmade box set, but not the official one). It’s called Sealed With A Kick, and at some point I’ll discuss it a little more when I’m looking for filler.
-Speaking of which: one area in which I’m shamefully ignorant (for a Daria blogger) is the show’s Beavis And Butthead heritage (which seems more prominent in the pilot). I’ve never seen a full episode of B&B, and the few partial bits I’ve seen include no more than a few seconds of Daria. But I will go back and learn about it, and share my knowledge with you, the reading public.
-Seriously, you guys, I’m super excited about this project, and I hope you are, too!
