Daria Morgendorffer - in Daria

In Daria

In the series Daria which followed Beavis and Butt-head, Daria remains bespectacled and plain. She is an unfashionably dressed, highly intellectual, seemingly cynical and sarcastic teenage girl who is portrayed as an icon of sanity in an insane household in an equally insane upper middle class suburb. She resides with her vacuous, fashion-obsessed younger sister Quinn and career-obsessed parents Helen and Jake. John Allemang of The Globe and Mail said that Daria is "both the disappointment of her overachieving parents and an embarrassment to her boy-crazy sister Quinn." She had moved to a new school, having transferred from the one in Beavis and Butthead. Glenn Eichler said, in relation to Daria the series, of which he was a co-creator, "I like to think that I've helped her come out of her shell."

David L. Coddon of the San Diego Union-Tribune described Daria as "the anti-cheerleader, the un-social climber, the jaundiced eye in a cartoon world of too much makeup and superficial crayon colors." Coddon added that Daria "may look like a misfit, but the catch is that Daria's the only character on the show who 'gets it.' It's everyone else who's a misfit." Daria said in the first episode that she does not have low self esteem: she has low esteem of everybody else. Anita Gates of The New York Times said "The secret of Daria's popularity (everywhere but in her own home and school) may be our collective alienation." Gates says that "her tastes are a little dark." As an example, Gates used the fact that she reads "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg at a reading to the elderly program.

Eichler said "Apparently everyone, with the exception of a very few people who were hit on the head when they were very young, felt like they were outsiders. You either identify with her as an outsider or you sort of envy her ability to navigate her life as an outsider and stay sane." John J. O'Connor, a television critic for The New York Times, said "In short, Daria is the perfect anti-Barbie Doll. Merchants of fashion and cosmetics are beneath her contempt. Her refusal to be Miss Goody Consumer borders on the truly subversive." He concludes that Daria "is every glorious misfit I ever knew."

Allemang said that in Daria, Daria "seems more tortured and neurotic, if only because it's more clear that the airheads have won." Daria often talks to herself. Allemang adds "in a perky-teen world with its twisted values, soliloquies are the best hope of intelligent conversation." In addition he said "There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Daria, just because she can't or won't hang out with the cool kids." John J. O'Connor of The New York Times said that Daria has "a withering eye" towards her classmates. Emily Nussbaum for Slate would praise the show for both having a character that many disaffected teenagers could relate to and for showing "the flipside of her principled withdrawal from the world: her crippling terror of rejection, a streak of ugly self-righteousness".

Daria likes to watch the fictional television show Sick, Sad World with her best friend Jane. Gates added that "Daria is the kind of girl who reads Heart of Darkness and Edgar Allan Poe's Telltale Heart in class."