Did Daria end at just the right time?

[TMC]

I somehow find it interesting that its final, regular, 30 minute long episode (prior to the formal finale, the TV movie, Is It College Yet?), "Boxing Daria", was first broadcast in in June 2001, less than three months before the 9/11 attacks.

I bring this up because, it's pretty safe to say that the horrific events of September 11, 2001 represented a major cultural shift. It has even been regularly suggested as the official end of whatever was left of the 1990s from a cultural influence standpoint.

Daria always struck me as a definitive "'90s show", where if you want to show people how high school and teenage life may have genuinely been like in America around 1996-2001, you would show them this show.

Daria is this for the late '90s and the very early 2000s, to the point of having a page on the fandom's wiki about it. Like many other 90s media about teens and early twentysomethings, a large part of the characterization of Daria and her friends is an obsession with being "alternative" rather than the shallow, conformist and boring mainstream. This could only exist in the 90s and the very early 00s, during a period of comparative peace and prosperity that left the youth in a state of aimless ennui with nothing to complain about. All this quickly fell out of fashion after the 9/11/2001 attacks, apart from the fact that by then, the line between "alternative" and "mainstream" had been erased for some time. The dated nature of the show is also very apparent in original runs of the show, where the incidental music is composed of popular songs from the era. The DVD release uses new, generic incidental music to avoid prohibitive licensing costs.

With that being said, I wonder if Daria as a character would be harder to root for had the show come out a few years later. Going back to my earlier point about 9/11, the things that young hipsters like her may have railed against now likely seemed like small world problems in light of the War on Terror.