Susie Lewis took a girl who stood in the corner of Beavis and Butt-Head and, with Glenn Eichler, built one of television's best comedies about being fifteen around her. She says it is still her proudest work.
Fi1m perspective
On screen, Daria Morgendorffer hardly moves. Her mouth opens, the line comes out flat, and the picture holds while everyone around her fails to understand it. That was the whole idea when Susie Lewis and Glenn Eichler lifted her out of Beavis and Butt-Head, where she had been the girl in the corner who was cleverer than the two of them put together, and gave her a series of her own on MTV in the spring of 1997. The drawing barely moves and the jokes are dry as chalk, and it is a superb comedy about being fifteen.
Lewis came to it from the machine room. She had started at MTV as an intern, then worked on the music-video segments of Beavis and Butt-Head, picking the videos, editing them and overseeing the two boys' commentary, before co-producing the show. When the network asked for a show for girls, with women writing and directing it, Lewis and Eichler answered with Daria. She wrote and produced it and supervised the first three seasons, from 1997 to 1999, and stayed on as a consultant for the remaining two.
What she and Eichler got right is the thing most teenage comedy gets wrong. Daria decides the world around her is stupid, and the show spends five years checking her working. Often she is right. Often she is not, and the series is at its sharpest when it lets her be wrong and does not soften the landing. We laughed at her, and more than once we realised the show had turned the laugh round on us, because her contempt was ours and the episode had quietly shown it to be lazy. That is a harder trick than the cheap animation lets on, and the tone is Lewis's as much as Eichler's.
There is not much else to weigh. Lewis moved on to producing, and her longest job since has been as supervising producer on Sea Rescue from 2014 to 2021, work of a different kind that we have not reviewed. She was not part of the later Daria spin-off projects, and she has said the original remains "my greatest creative achievement, my proudest work". We have no reason to argue. Five seasons of a girl who barely moves, saying the quiet true thing, is more than most careers leave behind.
Biography
Susie Lewis is an American writer and television producer. She is best known as the co-creator, with Glenn Eichler, of the MTV animated series Daria (1997–2002), on which she served as producer, writer and creative supervisor for the first three seasons.
Lewis attended Temple University in Philadelphia and graduated from the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. She began her career at MTV working on Beavis and Butt-Head, before developing Daria as a spin-off. She has also worked as a voice director and actress on several animated series, including voicing Andrea on Daria.
Later credits include supervising producer on Sea Rescue (2014–2021), for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award. She is also credited as Susie Lewis Lynn on some voice work.
