Buffy Open Thread

The other thing I did to make time pass on the 22 hour transit was watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer first season DVD's (just in case you thought I didn't take my own advice to buy when Amazon put them on 75%-off sale). I never got into Buffy when it was the new thing but I figure the massive pop cult must be about something. I'm only half through my discs and not exactly getting it. Oh, it's fun. I get the combination of action, romance, chronic low-grade parody, etc. The school setting plus episodic high adventure. (I don't think it's a coincidence that both Buffy and Harry Potter are popular. I get it.) Then again I don't. I don't see the archetypic greatness wossname. Xander and Willow seem distinctly sub-Breakfast Club, characterization-wise. This is particularly painful in light of Alyson Hannigan's more fully developed character in the American Pie movies. Basically the same character but with more nuance. It doesn't seem to me a good thing that I can say this - not about the movies or myself. But I did go to band camp for several years. And Cordelia is so one note. And Buffy's mom isn't fun. Giles is fun but his schtick is necessarily limited.

Is the Buffy cult due to something that happens later - in a later season, maybe? Is it some cumulative thing that builds on gradual twists and complications and developments of the slight and simple structure I'm seeing so far? I'm not threatening to quit. I'm curious. (I could google and get my answer, of course, but I prefer for our discerning readership to weigh in. When I get up tomorrow morning I want to sip coffee and read what you have to say about why Buffy is great.)

If all this is too erudite for you, an alternative exercise. Almost a year ago, Teresa Nielsen Hayden crafted a very nice definition in this delightful post:

MARY SUE (n.): 1. A variety of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, often involving heroic or romantic interactions with the cast of characters of some popular entertainment. 2. A distinctive type of character appearing in these stories who represents an idealized version of the author. 3. A cluster of tendencies and characteristics commonly found in Mary Sue-type stories. 4. A body of literary theory, originally generated by the fanfic community, which has since spread to other fields (f.i., professional SF publishing) because it’s so darn useful. The act of committing Mary Sue-ism is sometimes referred to as “self-insertion.”

My question: in retrospect, can Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit be helpfully classified as Mary Sue fiction for history fans, do you think? With the author self-inserting as 'World Spirit' (silly names are one of the litmus tests, after all.) Maybe you don't see where I'm going here, but I think it's a Kierkegaardian point.

Comments

[SomeCallMeTim]

Ummm....I like Buffy a lot, but not enough that I can tell you what induces people to join the cult. That said, I'd note that

(1)the show is flatter during the first season than during later seasons;
(2) the high school experience itself is pretty archtypie for most of us, so you have to correct for that when judging things like Buffy;
(3) a lot of the fun is just watching something clever on TV, since that seems relatively rare now; it's a bit like watching a really good screwball comedy - you know the paces, you know the end, but the journey is fun and its always nice to see someone do something well;
(4) Buffy isn't a great show, so much as a good show that has some really great episodes (e.g., some of the Halloween episodes, the musical);
(5) this is probably exactly the opposite of what the cultists feel, but the show sucks when it gets serious, in general;
(6) what's weird is that the Mary Sue (if I understand what that means) in Buffy is Willow, and for the first few seasons that means that the idealized girl's success is that she's friends with the popular blonde girl; that's a bit depressing, now that I think of it.

I am now off to pick a fight and re-affirm my manhood.

[Aeon Skoble]

Public service message:
Buffy and Philosophy

[Kip Manley]

The first season sets it up and lets you know: hey, there's a fun show here. Worth catching it on Tuesday nights. Why not.

The second season has more fun, a couple of ragged episodes, screwballs into greatness with a couple of one-two punches you don't see coming, and then scales a pop-operatic Everest for the finale; SomeCallMeTim is missing the point of some of the seriousness, I think, but that's okay.

Third season? Haven't watched it as a lump lately, so I'm not sure how well it's held up, and there's an egregious bit of business they have to clean up from second season to keep the suits happy, and they do it better than not, but still. —I'm a second-season partisan; third has its supporters. There are moments of greatness, but it just doesn't have the voodoo that second season did.

Fourth season has the best individual episodes—"Restless" is a frickin' tour-de-force—and bits of the overall arc work, but as a whole, not so much.

Fifth season is far and away the tightest, arc-wise—once you get past first, see, they really push the seasonal story arcs, and that's where you get a lot of the fan-juice; I don't know if it's an accident or not, but Whedon & co. manage to map Syd Field's three-act screenwriting structure onto the sweeps-week beats of American TV schedules, and when it worked, it worked very well indeed. —But for all its mojo, fifth season has the weakest opening episode and badly flubs the run-up to the ending, so overall ends up disappointing. Worth the ride, but still.

Sixth season opens dark and strong and has the musical and then promptly takes a nose-dive into hell. Gah!

Seventh season? There were moments.

So definitely move on to second season and see if that does it for you. The characters deepen and twist, the relationships build, and even David Boreanaz's acting improves. If not? Go grab Firefly. It's a superior show on pretty much every level.

[Miguel Sánchez]

Very few tv shows stand up to such sustained viewing. It's meant to be watched one episode a week, not all at once.

Buffy was way overhyped, though it had a number of good episodes. The characters, or some of them, did grow after the first season, but that's generally the case with any successful show.

It was never the same after they blew up the high school.

[Matt McGrattan]

I'm not a religious follower of the show but have watched it intermittently over the years and the later series are significantly better.

So much so that when the BBC repeated the 1st series a few years back it seemed pretty lame compared to the mid-to-later series.

I'd have watched it more if they'd just replaced Sarah Michelle Gellar with Eliza Dushku right from the start :-) ...

[Doctor Memory]

Kip pretty much said everything I'd have to say on the subject, but I'll amplify this bit: stop watching after Season 5. Just pretend the show ended there. You'll be much, much happier.

Okay, maybe an exception for "Once More With Feeling", but understand that for all the hype that particular episode got, it's basically a novelty gag, and it's probably not worth sitting through all of season 6 just to see Allyson Hannigan go mano-a-mano with a pitch-corrector.

[bob mcmanus]

"stop watching after Season 5."

Wrong. Season Six had the "Superhero demoted to McJob" theme and an unusual for network TV romance arc connecting sex with violence. Sado-mach stuff. Or something. That Geller hated it is a point in its favor.

Season 7 is a commentary on Bush foreign policy. :)

I have long believed that the 2nd and 3rd seasons of a long running series are the best.

[bob mcmanus]

"and for the first few seasons that means that the idealized girl's success is that she's friends with the popular blonde girl"

Nah. It is useful to compare Whedon's conception with the original Kirsty Swanson movie. The movie Buffy was Valley Girl/Cheerleader, and the mentor(Sutherland) was wise and uber-competent. As opposed to Giles the fumbler.

Whedon's original pilot had Geller as cheerleader, but before shooting began Geller became a nerd in a cheerleader's body. The divorced parents, the distant mother...Whedon from the beginning set up the ambiguity as to whether Buffy's inability to have a healthy relationship was a cost of being a superhero or a character flaw.

Swanson's reluctance was cute. Geller, having a needy mother, mentor, and friends, and community, in her profound dislike of her position of power and responsibility and in her inability to find escape valves or compensation, is tragic and fairly unattractive.

[Wax]

Since 'media criticism' is nominally my academic specialty, and Buffy is unquestionably my favourite pop-culture thingamajig - though The Sopranos, Firefly (by the same creative staff), and U2's Achtung Baby certainly surpass it in greatness on some more 'objective' level - I present the following with a mix of trepidation (because it's dear) and sheer unmitigated arrogance. The following is the correct opinion about BtVS, Belle. (I'm gonna get something out of graduate school, I swear to God!)

Abstract: At its best, BtVS is probably the best drama of its time. For consistent line-to-line quality, there are better shows (no, West Wing is not one of them, but The Sopranos is), but BtVS is one of the most finely-wrought shows on TV - it's not just a soap opera, though it borrows generic elements; it's definitely not just a gender-inverted adventure show; it's not just a comedy. Its season-long arcs are generally beautifully paced, and about halfway through Season Two the writing staff nailed down a new emotional pitch (there's a particular scene at which you can literally feel a change taking place in the show's meaning and style - it chills the spine) that they carried forward throughout the show's run. There are certainly bad episodes, but generally they fail grandly rather than for lack of ability on anyone's part.

The first season is just enjoyable but shaky and kind of amateurish, Belle, so your dubiousness is totally understandable. But you should give Season Two a chance nonetheless, because the show keeps improving - episode to episode, even - for a period of a couple of years. And by the time you get to Season Five, everything about the series just works, and there are few such extended works on TV that compare.

OK, long semi-effusive carrying-on follows:

The show's this total outsiders-rule! freak-festival, and if you were the popular kid in high school (and why do I instinctively doubt this in the case of the best blogger/writers?!) then a lot of the show just ain't going to resonate. OK so that's the first thing. The second thing: I know this sounds totally lit-crit-wanktacular, but the point of every single episode up until pretty much the seventh season is allegorical. There are some deeply silly adventure plots in play here, but they're always just a pretense. Only the people on the show matter. And anyhow the plots do get better - by Season Three, the season-long plots are very very well-integrated with the one-offs, and that season has few duds as a result.

As for the characters themselves: all of them deepen and grow tremendously over the years, of course (even on American TV, they'd have to), but by the second season there's already a lot of growth and change in the show's population. Willow is probably the most changed, actually - at first she's just a very shy damsel-in-distress, but by late in the second season that's all gone. And Giles comes in for some good character stuff in Season Two as well. Cordelia? Up and down, yeah. They didn't need a full-time wisecracker/skeptic in the cast by Season Three, so she's totally superfluous at that point - though she and Xander get their best character stuff in that season.

Too long already! Damn.

If you get to the end of Season Two and you're as blown away by the final arc as fans were (and continue to be, as many still hold the season-ending episodes to be the show's most perfect-pitched), you're probably not going to be able to stop watching anyhow. But Kip is mostly right: Season Four is uneven but does have a couple of the best individual episodes: if you're interested in TV-as-moviemaking in the abstract, then it's worth seeing 'Hush' (a tribute to silent filmmaking, without dialogue for more than 20 minutes of screentime) and 'Restless' (a surreal dream narrative consisting entirely of poetic ruminations on the foregoing and not a little bit of foreshadowing, a really daring piece of television that's also a great behind-the-camera achievement). All the gimmicky 'save XYZ/find ABC/destroy QED' plots run together by then: it's a soap opera, except with actual humans instead of, um, soap opera characters. Something of an achievement.

Honestly, you might want to quickly gloss over the first half of Season Two, hitting only highlights until you get to the two-parter 'Suprise'/'Innocence', at which point the character of the show really changes (due at least in part to a changed writing staff). That's when the over-the-top gothic romance really kicks in, and Kip's 'pop-operatic Everest' just about covers it. Season Three sustains that intensity all the way through, even in the lighter moments; it's emotionally the most intricate early season.

Season Four you can skip through and watch highlights, probably; you'll miss character stuff but the season is an interregnum in any case. I tend to come back to Season Four most often, to sample individual bits, but its season-long plot is symbolically neato and narratively a ridiculous pastiche. So yeah.

5-7 are for grownups in a way that 1-4 are not. That much at least I can promise. :)

Seasons Five through Seven are of a piece; since it was originally a high school show, and that mandate had been left behind by Season Five, it became a Perils of Young Adulthood show. Five is the show's most finely-wrought, a success in every category. If you can watch it in a single day, do so. Six is darker, more emotionally intense, waaaay more self-reflexive and 'fannish'. And of course it contains the musical. Underrated by fans mainly because there's so much suffering and so little catharsis (until the last possible moment).

Seven is a capstone about which it's hard to say much, because production circumstances affected its progress so heavily. The progress to the end is shaky, but the final episode is a perfect conclusion and summation of the show. Since BtVS is a series with a Big Point, the finale gets to make that point in spades. Incredibly, the final image is earned, and beautiful - simultaneously kind of surprising and kind of not surprising in the least.

Oh man, I really go to pieces talking about this stuff!

[Wax]

By 'Belle' I of course mean 'John', because I am outstanding that way. :)

[Richard]

Whedon created the show specifically to suck in everyone in the U.S. who'd felt like an outcast in high school, that is, the entire population. He wanted a cult show, and he picked a big enough demographic that he got an enormous "cult following".

I'm a complete sucker for it. And Firefly, which hooked me even harder than Buffy did.

Buffy breaks down into three sections with their own arcs. It also makes watching the whole thing less intimidating, since you can work your way through one section at a time.

1: High School: Seasons 1-3
2: College: Seasons 4-5
3: Young Adulthood: Seasons 6-7

Section 1 is still my fave, pushing every single stupid maudlin sentimental high-school button I have.

[Kip Manley]

To disagree briefly with Wax re: sixth season:

Underrated by fans mainly because there's so much suffering and so little catharsis (until the last possible moment).

This is the canonical reason for fannish discontent with sixth season, but it's wrong wrong wrong. I'm someone who slags on it; I know lots of people who slag on it; our main complaint is they didn't go far enough. The pacing of the Big Bad is botched at best, which takes what was truly an electrifying premise (heavily foreshadowed in the opening: they knew where they were going, but didn't have the balls to get there properly) and fucking it up, and leaving a gaping hole in, well, just about everything, that season seven can't quite manage to patch over.

Sure, there are fans who dislike six because it was too "dark." But they're silly, and that's not why it failed.

—Plus, it's got that atrociously bad Don't Do Drugs episode, that mangles the show's at best allegorical relationship with magic, making the world-builders in the audience groan and walk away.

[bob mcmanus]

"our main complaint is they didn't go far enough."

Agreed, if I know what you mean. Hard to avoid spoilers. I was expecting an ending to season six that I didn't get. Though I am not sure if the show or the characters could have survived the logical resolution.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

I'm still working my way through Buffy, but it has captured me long-term in a way that even STTNG didn't. ANd the final two episodes are pretty much perfect. As a father to two daughters, you will find yourself wiping away tears of "Damn, that's cool"-ness.

[rob loftis]

ok, I haven't read the dissertation Wax posted above yet, so my defense of Buffy may be redundant. I'll just try to hit a few major things that are right about Buffy.

1. Language: Buffy and her friends speak a kind of elevated youth dialect. Early on the writers hit the right mix of teen slang, supernatural jargon, and pop culture references. The lines themselves are more dense than regular speech, giving the whole thing a combined high art/low art feel that is a real turn on.

2. Moral complexity: The fiction universe Joss created began with a standard super hero manichiean worldview, but quickly grafted onto that a real concern for the difficulties of real world ethics, and tried to do so without lapsing into relativism. Sure, other super-hero and horror bits of pop culture have done this, but they weren't on TV.

3. Feminism: It is nice to see feminist TV.

4. Characters: Xander and willow may start out sub-breakfast club, but they hardly stay there. Be patient. This is the part of the show that really grows on you.

Ok, I should either read wax's disseration, or actually do some work.

[C Mas]

Sorry, I've watched close to a season and a half of Buffy, and I found no magic spark there. I get why it clicks with people, but then again, I get why megachurches click with people, too. It doesn't make piling into a small stadium to gawk at a mass baptism on a Jumbotron - or poorly-scripted high school wish fulfillment framed as a subpar action-dramedy - any more appealing to me.

[washerdreyer]

I just finished Season six today. It isn't good. I'm also surprised about how much praise there is for five in this thread, I thought five was more of a mixed bag than some of you. I'm adding season seven to my netflix cue, but I have a lot of trepidation about how good it'll be. Oh, despite the tenor of this comment, I'm a very big fan of the show overall.

[SomeCallMeTim]

Wow. I really disagree with the hard core fans here. I'm with washerdreyer. The first 4 seasons were really good, but I hated the Glory arc of Five, Season Six blew, and Seven - well, at that point, I honestly wanted more dead slayers and Scoobies(inc. Buffy).

This is probably a just pure reflection of my relative (or even absolute) shallowness.

[Jacob T. Levy]

Not much to add, except that I'm shocked by this lapse in John's otherwise typically impeccably correct taste!

I disagree with wax in a few details but he (he?) summarizes the fundamentals very well. "one of the most finely-wrought shows on TV"-- that's just right. And, in even minor episodes or annoying arcs, there's always something special, some little character gem or wonderfully-written exchange, that means I'm very happy to have watched it again. Eventually there are plotlines that bug me-- but what eventually qualified as a decline in quality for BTVS still left it 'way above most stuff out there, to say nothing of most genre TV. When I think about how ripping-one's-eyes-out unwatchable X-Files or Lois & Clark or ST:TNG were at their worst, and compare that to season 7 episodes that I'll complain about while watching but still watch over and over again, I'm all the more impressed with Whedon.

(I'm surprised-- no discussion of, or comparison with, Angel yet...)

[Max]

(I'm surprised-- no discussion of, or comparison with, Angel yet...)

I agree. In some ways I think Angel was by far the most satisfying mix of schlock and wit--free of the high school baggage, the romance angles, and the "breakfast club" archetypes that Buffy locked into right from the start, it got much weirder, much faster.
I mean, Karaoke fortune-telling? Puns-as-Big-Bads? Recurring poltergeists? Puppets??
Even the more formulaic pieces (the second season's McCarthy-ist allegory, for example) were just beautifully done.

Plus, we got more Faith.

[Russell Arben Fox]

"When I think about how ripping-one's-eyes-out unwatchable X-Files or Lois & Clark or ST:TNG were at their worst, and compare that to season 7 episodes that I'll complain about while watching but still watch over and over again, I'm all the more impressed with Whedon."

Never watched X-Files, nor Lois & Clark, nor Buffy. But did ST:TNG really ever dscend to "ripping-one's-eyes-out unwatchable" level? To rip one's eyes out in anger and pain assumes the loss of something; if something had been terrible from the beginning, or at least never really very good, one wouldn't feel that anguish when the tv show (or movie series, or comic book, or whatever) tanked. And ST:TNG never tanked. Just plain crummy for most of the first two seasons, major jump in quality in the third, fourth through sixth were consistently great, and the seventh was a nice even coast with only some minor bumps until the end. Yes, there were always occasional stinkers, but nothing that could make you lose faith.

ST:DS9, on the other hand, did tank, big time. Damn, how I hated what was happening to that show towards the end. Ripping one's eyes out, indeed.

[jholbo]

What a delightful thread. Thanks, all, for contributing. Let me fan the flames by being a little more specific about my response to the show so far. Let me respond, specifically, to Jacob, who contrasts good Buffy with bad X-Files, of which there came to be more and more as the seasons dragged. (I was a complete fanatic about that show for about four seasons.) It's clear to me that Buffy has the potential for greatness, in part because it has the potential to revel in X-Filish preposterosity while avoiding certain X-Filish pitfalls. (I realize it is rather silly for me to use the future tense in discussing Buffy's potential, but for me most of the seasons are in the future. So there.) Let me explain where I see the potential.

Just for fun, let's do it this way. Here's a sketch for an X-Files episode worthy of inclusion in the select set of self-parodies the show offered us. (Those were great, weren't they?) Call this episode "The Icing On the Cake". The teaser opening treats us to a pair (or maybe trio) of apparently stock alien abductions. Car stalls on lonely highway. Fire in the sky. Cone of light. Spooky tall grey snatching its victim through the bedroom window while the victim lies frozen. Another snatched out of a commercial airplane in flight. An impossible door of white light opening, etc. Then the creepy steely gray montage; panic flash glimpses of the awful alien operating theater. The implants. All very cliched. Da-duh-dah-dum-de-dum-dum-dum. Plink, plink, plink. The X-Files. The truth is out there. [break for ad] Then. The alien craft has mysteriously crashed, having suffered some sort of massive accident/catastrophe. Mulder and Scully are on the case, of course being frustrated by the military who are keeping the thing under wraps. There should be some unusually, humoristically unbelievable cover-story. Concern from Mulder that this crash indicates that the aliens are stepping up their operations, trying something new and bold that isn't quite working yet. Anyway, it turns out that what happened was that one of the victims was a witch, who put a curse or hex on the craft, causing it to crash. Another victim was - oh, I don't know - el chupacabra, who bit the alien that was trying to implant something in him. Or a werewolf maybe. The third was a Russian immigrant; the product of some Soviet genetic experiment gone wrong years ago. He's like lamprey-guy from that early episode, the guy who could squeeze through tiny spaces. He squeezes his way out of the alien operating theater and makes trouble for the greys. Good scenes of the greys trying to handle all this on their craft all at once. Of course they can't talk and they don't have facial expressions but there would have to be the scene in which the alien commander glances blankly at some underlings who have clearly just brought him the bad news. His expressionless eyes convey an eloquently angry interrogatory: 'Why is there a Mexican vampire, a witch, and an anthropomorphic lamprey loose on my ship?' All this gets figured out by Mulder in stages. Through interviews with the victims, who can't remember what happened, he puts the pieces together. And Scully is all skeptical: 'but just because there was a witch, that doesn't explain the bite marks', etc. Finally it all fits together. So the joke is that it's a mash-up of things that are normally given their own episodes, nominally segregating the absurdity that SO MANY THINGS happen to Mulder and Scully.

Getting back to Buffy. One of the show's advantages is that it is part of its basic self-parodic conceit that there is a reason why so many things are happening at once. Overdone incongruity is stipulated to make sense when you are sitting on a Hellmouth. Way too much icing on the devil's and angel food cake is part of the recipe, and a good thing. (In the X-Files, this just got embarrassing after a while. Trying to keep track of the main conspiracy story-line while folding in all single episode elements? It's just silly.) But what is needed to make this work well in Buffy is a bigger cast than I am seeing so far. There needs to be a vast cast of recurring minor characters. Teachers. Other students. Buffy's mom. Relatives. The neighbors. It should be as big as the Simpsons' cast, and every one of them distinctive and charming. (Think Hogwarts, which is blessed with a cornucopia of personalities.) So far the new characters that get introduced tend to be dead, or else not important any more, by the end of the episode. So I'm curious whether the dramatic landscape of Sunnydale is going to spread out and the cast expanded. If it keeps being just the nuclear family of Buffy, Willow, Xander, Angel and Giles, then my prediction is that the potential is not going to be realized. I will report back with my findings as I continue to pursue my researches.

Maybe the school's blue-haired secretary could be a oujia-board-using psychic who always has good advice but is always offending Giles' delicate scholarly sensibilities with her menthol-smoking ways and pointy Far Side glasses. She should be played by the actress who played the secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And could have parodies of lines from that film. "Oh, everyone is out to get Buffy. The vampires, the jocks, the valley girls, the witches, the dweebs, the mummies ..."

I realize it's a little bit late for me to be giving Joss Whedon free advice on how to make a successful TV series. I hope somehow he managed without me.

[Jacob T. Levy]

John,
I think you're going to be pleased. I won't spoil things for you by naming the future expansions of the cast, and won't pretend that it's going to reach Simpsons-size, but it decidedly does not keep "being just the nuclear family of Buffy, Willow, Xander, Angel and Giles."

Oh, and-- heh. for the X-Files episode, and for the evluation of the Hellmouth vs. crazy-coinkydink-X-Files.

Russell,
And ST:TNG never tanked. Just plain crummy for most of the first two seasons, major jump in quality in the third, fourth through sixth were consistently great, and the seventh was a nice even coast with only some minor bumps until the end.
On a season-by-season basis you're right. But after things got great with Klingon and Borg episodes, we'd get treated to another damn Data episode, or another damn holodeck episode, or another damn [shudder] Troi episode. Hopes raised and then dashed. A lot of the episodes from even season 4 and later I find utterly un-rewatchable. (And, of course, even the better episodes come to suffer by comparison with DS9 at its best.)

Max,
Yes!

[Russell Arben Fox]

"we'd get treated to another damn Data episode, or another damn holodeck episode, or another damn [shudder] Troi episode"

True. Or one about her mom.

[Ray Davis]

I thought the first season was unwatchably bad (if mercifully truncated). Second season very interesting. Third season my favorite. Fourth and fifth seasons intermittant, with high highlights. Sixth season schizo, betraying some of the most intelligently harrowing TV I've ever seen with a truly stupid and internally contradictory Just Say No plotline. Seventh season a dull fiasco, a dutiful trod towards a conceptually enticing but unearned ending.

I'm very glad to have seen seasons 2-6.

Does anyone here have screen captures of the motivational posters at the Double Meat Palace?