Daria: Season 04 (2000)

For its 2002 fourth season, Daria revisited the themes and comic approaches it had employed on MTV the previous three years. High-school politics, family warfare, and the occasional movie parody kept the titular angsty teen (voice of Tracy Grandstaff) -- and her audience -- in stitches. But even as it wandered around familiar territory, the show found time to explore one new milieu: that of the soap opera. Daria's friendship with Jane (voice of Wendy Hoopes) and her love/hate relationship with Jane's boyfriend, Tom (voice of Russell Hankin), provided Daria with its first-ever season-long through-line. From its opener to its cliffhanger finale and beyond, Daria's penultimate season wove a dense continuing plot out of the title character's sexual awakening and the resulting stress on her friendship with Jane. Really, the final two seasons and the two movie-length specials that punctuate them can be viewed as one long storyline. Of course, not all episodes focused on Daria's love triangle. Supporting characters sometimes took center stage. Quinn (voice of Wendy Hoopes) continued her metamorphosis into an actual person. And college loomed larger than ever on the horizon. By the time the first special Is It Fall Yet? appeared between the fourth and fifth seasons, a senior-year framework similar to that of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 3 and not one but two seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 had been established. In short, Daria had become an honest to God continuing serial. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi