In a World of Tommy Shermans, Be the Misery Chick
“People aren’t upset that Tommy Sherman died. They’re upset that they’re going to die.”
Tommy Sherman died this week. If you don’t know who that is, I will explain. Tommy Sherman is a fictional football player in a singular episode of Daria (1997) entitled, “The Misery Chick.”
In 1997, this story was about teenagers confronting death and the morality that swirls around when somebody, a terrible somebody, of note dies. In 2025, it’s about how political violence—perpetrated on Black and Brown people by police, an ongoing genocide, mass shootings, etc.—is so normalized in the U.S. that when someone of infamy dies, we are immediately confronted with how that violence can come to roost in our own lives, and so we must twist ourselves in knots to denounce violence because it’s righteous and good to do so, or lionize a man who would not shed a tear over our demise.
In the episode, an old star football player returns to Lawndale High to anoint a brand new football goalpost in his honor. He struts about campus like a peacock, insults everyone in his path, even Kevin the current quarterback that worships him. Sherman (a grown man) even tries to solicit sex from the cheerleader, Britney, and when that doesn’t go as planned he derides her: “Did someone flash the bimbo signal?”
Daria, the deadpan titular character, observes all this throughout act I of the episode. She finally has to interact with him herself when she finds him leaning against her locker. Without prompting, he insinuates he would never deign to speak to Daria, but maybe her friend Jane after a few drinks, presumably a comment about their looks. “Congratulations. You must have worked very hard to become such a colossal jerk so quickly,” Daria says in her iconic monotone. Sherman then calls Daria a “misery chick,” a pathetic person who hates “winners” like him. Not long after he storms away, Jane remarks that perhaps he’ll drop dead, to which Daria replies, “Come on. You know wishes don’t come true.” Right on cue, the very goalpost that was meant in Sherman’s honor, falls and kills him, sending the school into a state of frenzied mourning.
Many characters, from Kevin and Britney to the English teacher and her own sister, all flock to Daria for advice. To them, she is “gloomy,” “thinks about the dark side,” the list goes on, so she should know how to deal with this confluence of events. Britney is the only one who admits that “Tommy Sherman was a jerk,” for which she is immediately upset with herself. Daria consoles her that it doesn’t make her a bad person to not feel bad about Sherman’s death. The common refrain from everyone is that "it really makes you think."
Meanwhile, the central conflict of the episode swirls around Daria and her best friend Jane, who feels like Daria’s cavalier attitude toward the death of Sherman is in poor taste, which culminates in their confrontation at the end of the show. Jane admits she’s been struggling with the coincidental wish she made and Daria’s bluntness. Daria cuts right through the hemming and hawing by asserting that Tommy Sherman was not a good person, reiterating earlier in the episode where she says even the person eulogized by the school does not resemble the actual person she met.
With every post, article, and TikTok that comes across my feed, like Daria I watch as pundits on both sides of the aisle weep for Tommy Sherman. Tears are shed and ink spilled to “mitigate” the damage that would be done whether Tommy Sherman was killed or not. People get fired because they stated factual information of the things he said and did to people.
But for those people who look like Tommy Sherman and find themselves agreeing with the things Sherman says, they are blindsided. They live in a world where their guy won and there was promised safety (as there always is when you align yourself with fascism), and yet political violence has come directly for them—political violence that has always existed for the targets of Tommy Sherman and his ilk. “People aren’t upset that Tommy Sherman died,” Daria says at the end of the episode. “They’re upset that they’re going to die.”
This piece isn’t about Tommy Sherman.
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