I really like this Marisa Meltzer’s article from The Paris Review about the lack of sassy teen girls on TV.  Like her, I’ve noticed that the witty, snarky, and sometimes angry teen girls that we got accustomed to seeing on shows like Buffy and Daria in the 90’s and early 2000’s have mostly disappeared from primetime.  This feels especially relevant to me because I’ve been rewatching Veronica Mars in the last few weeks, partly for vague academic reasons and partly because I discovered that you can watch all three seasons instantly on Netflix.  (Yes!)  Though Veronica’s understanding of personal privacy sometimes leaves a lot to be desired, her struggles as the insider-turned-outsider of Neptune, California, and her snarky personality, represent for me an interesting combination of the “super-smart, dry, withering, righteously angry girls” like Daria that Meltzer describes, and the current “heroines whose principal interests . . . are status and men,” as on shows like Gossip Girl.  Through Veronica’s flashbacks to her previous shallow life in which her main interests included keeping the attention of her somewhat dull boyfriend Duncan Kane and staying high on the Neptune High social ladder, we see how those old desires can still influence her new life, even amidst her stone-cold determination to find her friend Lilly’s murderer and her satiric critiques of Neptune’s somewhat absurd social hierarchies.

I think its important, however, not to just long for the Buffys and the Darias of the past, but to look into how those types of characters might be evolving into something newer and different–I’m not totally convinced that sassy teens have completely disappeared (Nikki Blonsky’s character Will on Huge definitely has some sass in her), and I look forward to seeing how the Daria teen sass legacy will affect future TV teens.