Why do I not get, care for, and in fact utterly disdain Buffy et al?

andy

why havent they made a(nother) movie yet though? no point perhaps?

I suspect ppl are reading FAR more into the plotlines actually and I get v suspicious when 'cultural commentators' talk abt some 'truth' abt human nature that Buffy is supposed to be revealing.

A friend of mine has every series on tape and is a huge fan (funnily enough I was the one who recommended this stuff to him) (I should ask why he likes it though I'm not sure if i trust him as he likes fucking stargate as well).

i think whedon recognises that i. he is better at TV than movies, ii. TV is (currently) wide open for better deeper work than movies

(nevertheless, xena movie now!!)

note to self: in the summer get all the buffy tapes from my friend and watch them and report back.

why?

no he's a dickhead.

I think there is an amount of over-reading done with Buffy, but that just shows its quality as a multi-faceted text - the ability to find different satisfactory readings says something first about the text but primarily about the audience.

I do my best.

''I wasn't even discussing AA Gill himself''

yeah I know. Just that I hate him.

''because it shows us that the pop universe is notexhausted''

did you think the pop universe was exhausted before the musical episode?

I haven't seen it so the rest of yr post doesn't make too much sense but I'm sure more will become clear when i watch it.

no yr not, you are clearly going in several minutes you fucking prick

my X-Files love was weird - i avoided it at first - didnt get into it until end of Season 2 - became an absolute fanatic by end of Series 3 but lost the plot again after end of Season 5. spent a couple of years away from it totally then just somehow drifted back into it and spent last year catching up with the 'conspiracy arc' from Season 6 onwards and loving it completely, even the hopelessly lost phase where Mulder was missing/being tortured/insane or all three and hardly in it paving the way for Robert Patrick and 'Moronica'

it redeemed itself entirely with the final episode ever tho, if only for Cancer Man's 'explosive okay diehards stop moaning here's your fucking satisfactory death sequence - are you happy? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? you'd better be you little nerdlings!' final scenes

I think the Hollywood musical was, in a sense, the most sophisticated product of a modernist universe - the one that came into being with cinema, jazz, a certain kind of songwriterly sophistication etc. A pop gesamtkunstwerk, if you want to be Wagnerian about it: a drawing together of lots of threads into a new kind of knot.

Now, let's say a postmodern universe came into being with tv, the teenager, pop music. For a while now, we've been saturated with these histories - and one kind of cultural response to this is entropy. That is, there was a big flareup of creativity, and now we're just left playing mix and match, namedropping, showing how well versed we are in pop - eg the entire oeuvre of Kevin Williamson or 'Popular'. What do we do with all this smartness? The renewed interest in the musical, '69 Love Songs', 'Moulin Rouge' etc are one kind of response to the situation - an adventurous sense of self-conciousness. Some of these things have their merits, but I think part of the importance of 'Once More with Feeling' is that it's the most successful pop confection that's married its learning to a deep love and empathy for pophistory, mixed it all together with wit and sophistication and created something that's richer than the sum of its parts.

('The Simpsons' is equally rich - but it doesn't move me as much)

This wasn't enough to get me to tune in the next week for the second episode, though.

its no less interesting than Buffy's, they have roughly the same array of characters to explore etc. - i suppose Buffy's scope is wider because of the close family ties and the fact that most of them are still tied to the high school/college - and high school/college seems to be the cornerstone of fun teen viewing in the States

I'd agree with him that the musical episode of Buffy was the most sophisticated piece of TV that I saw last year. I also hate (read "doesn't do anything for me") Buffy. I like Popular and CSI.

I got nowhere near the erudition and perspicacity of JtN when trying to figure out why though. (His 'thread into one new knot' metaphor? *melt* an' that.)

My reasons would have to hinge on a close reading of the episode rather than putting it in this wider context that JtN whipped up from the intellectual nowhere.

I think part of the importance of 'Once More with Feeling' is that it's the most successful pop confection that's married its learning to a deep love and empathy for pophistory, mixed it all together with wit and sophistication and created something that's richer than the sum of its parts.

This is interesting because I actually feel this could describe MST3K, as mentioned previously still my favorite TV show ever. Clearly the two shows aren't meant to be equatable and come from two different traditions (Buffy's soap opera gone widescreen TV vs. MST3K's bad-movie/funny-host gambit; the one time MST3K was shoehorned into a serial kind of format the creators resisted it and eventually freed themselves from it), but there's a definite high amount of learning on display, a definite love of pop and reference, definite wit and sophistication (but plenty of fart jokes too and the like ;-)), and definitely something very rich indeed results. Songs themselves were actually a regular running part of the presentation, and while there wasn't anything like a musical format, you could sense the references and play throughout in both analogues and original compositions (the Gilbert/Sullivan homage in a ninth season episode is still one of my favorite moments). The Simpsons got mentioned as something parallel, and I'd argue that South Park, the crudest of the four on the face of it, also demonstrates it (and of course it had its musical triumph with the movie).

My general impression of the musical episode was that it was like ER's live episode, though -- a bit of a stunt and potential ratings grabber, whatever the intentions. This of course doesn't mean the stunt can't work on its own (and clearly it does for many!), and the tweaking of a show to create a 'very special episode' was nicely turned on its head -- usually it's a comedy that gets 'dramatic,' here the idea was to reverse roles in part. But I'd actually say the 'silent' episode used a similar stunt to more interesting effect (general execution, well, a different matter), especially since a series so predicated on its fans appreciating its dialogue removed that key support. It may not possess what Jerry particularly appreciates about the 'musical,' but it had its own virtue.

I'm not entirely sure either! This is one reason why I asked the question and tried to tease out my reasons, at least as I could think of them at the time. I don't rate my pondering on it as something of more importance to my life than 99.99% of other things -- my dad's surgery being a very good recent example, say -- and you're right that I'm not staying up nights worrying about the comments against MBV on the ILM 'say something awful' thread or whatever. Nonetheless, this question was there, like a strange dull ache, and has been for a while. I might have written this months ago or months later or not at all...but as noted on another thread, it might just be me being a touch crankier this morning with the sore throat and all. ;-)

Perhaps ultimately it's an intellectual exercise into why something that theoretically could work doesn't -- why does something that you are 'supposed' to like, or at least could be aimed right at you very well, grate? The vagaries of taste and reception are a large part of the discussion on both boards and I've always been clear on the point of liking what you like and how ultimately that's that. But sometimes things can niggle and make you wonder -- a bit like the article I wrote a couple of years back for FT on the apotheosis of Stephin Merritt and how I wasn't all that impressed.

And it's not a bad thing too that Spike is utterly dreamy.

Ned if I lived closer to you I would let you borrow my dvds. But don't fret the not gettingness. It happens to the best of us.

Carey: Let me know! That would be MAD COOL.

I know that sounds silly, but I suddenly realized that's why I love the show.

Shows that are supposed to be more realistic, like Six Feet Under (which I still think is a fantastic show), somehow end up feeling like they're on another planet that is quite different from mine. There's a distance and a lack of whimsy.

No matter how dark my life has ever gotten, it has never lacked a sense of goofiness.

I've tried watching a few other shows to see if they could capture me like Buffy, because I was really surprised to find myself liking it after hating it for so long. But Smallville, Charmed, Gilmore Girls... Those shows are all cold and heartless and completely different from Buffy.

Having said that, I do like Buffy, and the X Files. Xfiles final episode was pretty crapola though.

Surely the point of Buffy when it comes down to it is that they're not afraid of mixing fun pop culture and (semi)serious drama? People bag the musical ep but I thought it fun, and a great incongruity as well, hearing them all singing cheese.

Recent episode where Anya reverts back to that day and sings some crappy love song about Xander was, however, absolutely nauseating.

But neither are we on ILX! Dang it, they should film us. ;-)

I don't know what period of the show yer judging Ned, but it sounds like you just don't need TV serials right now. I probably wouldn't watch the show if I had to sit through ads, cuz ads are too much hell to endure. Nothing on TV is THAT important, so don't feel bothered by saying you just don't need it.

Though I'll say Giles is who I want to be, Xander is who I fear I am, and I'm probably not gonna like it when Willow becomes a lesbian unless her girlfriend is REAL nice. And I vote Carey should go to Boston or NY, so I can visit easier.

thats funny, i can see Tony Soprano doing that too maybe

babylon five sold out the promise of its first series (first and second if i'm being SUPER generous)

Neither do I entirely, having seen what I've seen in syndication and the like for the most part. This is why I'm assuming I haven't just seen bits from 'the bad season' all the time or whatever!

Nothing on TV is THAT important, so don't feel bothered by saying you just don't need it.

Trust me, that really is the key to all this. TV may take more chances than movies, as Mark S notes, but I just really don't need TV in general anyway (as noted in other threads before this one), which arguably renders all this academic.

I was wondering, though. There seems to be a sense of wish fulfillment in the series with regard to its high school years at least (which may be patently obvious, but please hear me out). I'm not so silly as to think this is the ultimate answer to my conundrum, but to observe -- I've mentioned elsewhere that for me high school was, far from a hellmouth, a pretty enjoyable time. I don't remember days or weeks of hatreds and frustrations, I wasn't counting the days to get out of my house and somewhere else after graduation, if anything I was just bored a fair amount of the time and reading novels in class. I was on good terms with just about everybody, avoiding those who did bother me, had a couple of embarrassing moments but missed others, had fun in school plays, amused myself as I felt the need via videos or other books or whatever, had a couple of very close friends. Beyond that, there's nothing to remark about it, nothing that sticks or really excites the memory or is a lingering resentment or whatever. It just was, and it's past, and there we are.

Maybe (?) as a result, most anything revolving around a presentation of life in a high school/around high school days, no matter how campy or serious or whatever, doesn't interest me much. It's like there's no real point to a time I feel no real connection for at present (and since I have no kids right now, I can't really assume I'm going to see anyone go through it again at close quarters anytime soon). About the only things I can think of which I still enjoy or have fond memories of that specifically use a high school setting -- Square Pegs on TV, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Fast Times at Ridgemont High moviewise -- give me their pleasure by being products of the time I grew up in and are nostalgia buzzes first and foremost, though I appreciate the wit, humor and humanity in each as well. But I don't seek any other similarly set movies/productions out future or past, I never was much for the typical high/prep school novels -- was never interested in The Chocolate War or A Separate Peace, say.

Obviously it would be facile to say that the show is 'just' about high school (or college, for that matter). But it clearly can't be avoided either, and for me it's ultimately a bit of a dead end. Who knows?

It's got the same fantastical stuff as the X-Files with funnier, less obvious plot twists and more irreverences.

...is interesting, in that it could argue the case for an idea from the creators of, "Hey, here's something really cool and not realistic...but we're going to ground it anyway by this way and that." Sugaring the pill? Making it less of a worry to accept than straight up sf/fantasy? Nothing wrong or strange with that as a strategy, to be sure. But I admit some part of me thinks of that almost as a bit of a cop-out, though not for reasons I could easily spell out right now.

(Part of this could be that I'm also turning over a novel idea in my idea that specifically is a story about storytelling, about manipulation. In some respects it's about a full validation of the world-not-quite-ours we coexist with, the old PKD/Barker/Matrix trope but one that indicts the creator of the trope eventually. I think it'll be less about the story and more about me analyzing the part of myself that came up with the story and critiquing its pretensions. Doubt it will be At-Swim-Two-Birds part two or anything, but an overriding theme will still be the power and validation of imagination, if I ever get it written -- how fantasy is not geek fodder or sublimation of the real world or a vehicle for other themes seen to be more important, but an intrinsic part of life, not an escape valve. If I can make it work with the other ideas of the story I have going, I'll be very happy -- but it will take time.)

And Bring It On was fun, true. No real desire to see it again, though.

Heh. 'A novel idea in my head,' of course. ;-)

But ultimately I believe all writing and creation is fantasy anyway. Those who push for realism through and through are the ones trying to escape from it the most, creating a fantasy out of a grinding reality. And often it's not all that fun.

I should also mention Guy Gavriel Kay, who started with conventional trilogy fantasy (The Fionavar Tapestry) and then blew a hell of a lot of preconceived notions about what characters in fantasy could be out of the water, at least in my brain -- how they could be drawn not in black and white terms but in endless and shifting shades of grey -- with books like Tigana, A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of al-Hassan, all of which are ultimately about compromise, lack of guarantees, belief and struggle with belief and more. Tolkien has more of this ambiguity in his characters than I think both his supporters and detractors ever give credit for (it took me a while to actually fully understand it) but Kay foregrounds it and works with it brilliantly.

I think you're right, Anthony, in that it's as much a question of medium as anything else, though. The visual impact of film requires a different kind of nuance, and the adapation of LOTR alone is a good demonstration of that -- personally I think enough of the unease and unsurety survives, other commentators coming very much from a literary/philosophical viewpoint deplore the losses and excisions in the name of action and spectacle. But that's just me...

Them's fightin' words! The first series was good cause of Sinclair, but the whole 5 seasons worked because of their coherence. Well, compared to drivel like Trek, anyway.

But this is a buffy thread so I shoosh now.

(Personally, I think this would be a baaad idea)

So much is summed up in the first great moment of the show, when Buffy stakes a routine vampire while singing the line "nothing seems to penetrate my heart". We have the regular fantasy action of the show. We have Buffy stating the key theme of this series (she has been brought back magically from her afterlife in heaven, and cannot engage with this world), we have a joke that gets a laugh from just about everyone, we have the use of a typical popular song figure of speech and its simultaneous undermining, we have the camera moving in a way that has more to do with a Hollywood tradition than the way the show normally shows action. It's this extraordinary ability to do lots of useful things at once, remarkably seamlessly, which makes this episode an exceptional show from an exceptional series.

I say all this about one odd episode because it's the interactions between different aspects of the show that so impresses me, and makes this one of my favourite TV shows ever. And that isn't in some 'it's still only TV' way, because I think it's great art on any level. I've not seen anything else like it, on TV or anywhere else, and I think it makes as good use of its medium as just about anything else I've seen, in any medium.

As to why you should like it, Ned, I am not going to say that you should. You don't much fancy TV, you don't like watching a regular series. The high school thing is a few series in the past (it's now about becoming an adult, with some at uni, some in crap jobs, Buffy having to take parental responsibility for little sis Dawn after their mom died). I'd argue with you if you said it was rubbish, but no one likes all good things (or dislikes all bad ones) - it's not to your taste and that's not a problem, as far as I can see. (If you did want to get into it, I would say that you would see its virtues enormously more easily by wayching a stack of sequential episodes rather than occasional ones, mainly to see the bigger themes.)

Which it isn't, of course! I guess it's just after such a fine teasing out of the series' virtues on your part I feel all the more befuddled on my part. It's like someone saying (insistently but kindly!), "My god, this thing is it! It heals the sick, spreads peace everywhere, DO YOU SEE?" and me going, "But I don't...man, maybe I do hate fun."

I am not trying to pick a fight, it just seems kind of odd to me.

I mean, I am in a similar boat: My roommates are both huge Buffy fans, and I used to see a fair amount back when the tv was in the living room, and eventually I understood why my roommate (then there was just the one) liked the show even though I wasn't really interested in committing myself to a tv show.

But I'm serious! I think there's a very distinct line drawn between "I just don't like it and I know why" and "I don't like it but I'm not entirely sure why," and I'm not sure if the latter situation is encountered often or not.

If it makes you feel any better I never got all that into Loveless.

Doesn't really make me feel better or worse, I think. It's just something I know can happen. I can and have gone into extended raptures over that album, I know others can't stand it or don't bother and that's cool. Everyone's else's judgments are their own! It's my own that's the one which needs critiquing by me.

I expect Nabisco has been writing a twelve book poem to justify the ways of Buf to me.

I am still trying to figure out how to approach the immense topic of Why Buffy Is So Good.

I think it's about your fear of not being on top of everything anymore -- especially pop-culture wise.

See, the zeitgeist passes us all eventually.
You can't stop it from doing that.

And since you've made an impressive internet presence/2nd career from surfing that very zeitgeist, it's naturally going to throw you when you can't find stable footing on it anymore.

So don't try to force what can't be forced.
Just let it go.

It's ok to let things go.
It's painful at first, but it's ok.

And I mean that in the kindest possible way.

*hugs*

(sorry to have to put this on a public forum, but I sometimes feel that you listen more to people here than you do to them in person)

(*of course my 'High School' experience was more Hogwarts than Sunnydale so I may just have problems relating)

I never considered myself someone who had to be reading the right book/seeing the right show/catching the right movie in order to define what I've been doing or who I am, and I've generally ignored pop culture as constructed over a long period of time rather than a short one -- avoiding commercial radio for fifteen years, seeing very few movies in the theater for almost as long, not really knowing who the 'important' new writers are beyond some general names (though I like tracking the success of the UCI crew, to be sure!), the whole TV thing as mentioned -- measuring myself against whatever the current zeitgeist is supposed to be would be a fool's game. To pick TV as an example, I'd think that if I was finding it hard to let go in general, I'd be wondering why I didn't like any series getting a lot of attention -- I'm certainly not feeling any particular sense of loss over American Idol 2, though it's darn popular and though there's a good contingent of board members closely watching it, f'r instance, and it's a much more recent meme or what have you than Buffy is.

I'm not annoyed with Buffy's stature or place, I'm annoyed with my wondering if there's something I'm missing, because that is frustrating. I really don't have any sense of Buffy's cultural 'moment' -- if anyone else does I'd be intrigued to hear when they thought it was or is, Jerry makes a general case for it above and I tried to note how there might be other parallel moments that in fact applied that I enjoyed -- though I will say 69 Love Songs did have one and my thoughts then were a more specific reaction, true.

And that might be where the 'letting go' really applies, vis-a-vis music and last year in particular, and if there was a wrench, that's where it happened, as I've detailed and talked about it here and there. It's one reason why I'm so free-floating right now when it comes to whatever is happening musically, it's become almost this abstruse game that's amusing enough but no longer core or defined for my personality, at least for now. If anything I think the endless chase for the new is a bit of a non-starter -- I sympathize with Tom's dilettantism as he described it on FT but I honestly can't imagine myself putting in the time anymore to always be finding out new things just because they're new or as yet unheard though known just because they’ve been unheard but known. In particular the technological wonderland of the heavenly jukebox just seems so vast -- a meta'serial' that makes Buffy's run look like the miniscule thing it is -- that I think you almost have to keep it at arm's length to avoid getting endlessly lost in it. There's material sitting around in my collection that's years old that I haven't touched yet and all the mp3s collected over the moons just made that multiply -- old stuff, new stuff, everything -- and rather than taking the challenge to delve into it I regard it almost with a bemused detachment. At one point I think I would have said this was limiting and I think intellectually it perhaps still is, but one really can get exhausted, burnt -- and if there are other other pressures or worries or crises in one's life (and there are), then the chase takes even more of a back seat. If that's meant to be a letting go for the sake of, well, sheer sanity, then that's something I'll embrace, not reject or find a particular fault or worry about.

Of course, the weird thing is I’m still writing about music, still listening to it and all. Very strange! Maybe I’ve just found a balance without realizing entirely how I did it.

Ultimately though, you're right on a key point, I certainly can't force the darn thing -- I almost feel bad now for encouraging Nabisco's Big Long Response! But since Ess Kay and Tom are waiting on it as well as others, I'm sure it'll find a welcome audience indeed. :-)

(Actually, in reviewing this thread, I find it a bit odd that Martin said he’d really argue with me if I said the show was rubbish because I think I said right at the start I didn’t see much good in the shows I’ve seen in particular! Maybe my bark is worse than my bite…)

I can't offhand think of any other fantasy/SF tv series where the 'rules' - in other words the mechanics of the fantastic elements; what powers chatacters can/can't use; origin stories; even continuity - seem so unimportant to a casual viewer (i.e. me). I can get what's happening in an individual episode of Buffy without caring at all about any overarching plot.

(*this is supposedly changing but actually the evidence — according to N. for example — may still be that in the UK anyway, it ISN'T: ppl still like the contains-all centrality of the terrestrial stations, not the elective-affinity closed-offness of the so-called TV Emergent Zeitgeist)

i think tom's chris claremont citation is good, as i wd certainly consider CDC an ancestor of both Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi — surely they read himwhen young — though i think the prior netherworld which delivers the turnabout nature, in TV terms, of Buffy, is MUCH MUCH BIGGER (cf giant essay by me on tolkien's recasting of the entire project of The Gothic which some of you have read).

genuine turnabout moments can have disastrous effects (as skidmore keeps saying, Beatles => Rockism) in the medium being turned about: i think claremont's achievement — always implicit as a possibility in comics — has dark-flowered into something MUCH bigger and odder in the underfelting of pop culture at large

(i am *so* meant not to be reading ilx today)

The existence of this phrase alone, I realize, justifies the entire show. It has made me very happy on a nicely rainy Saturday morning. :-) Hurrah for Jerry!

cf for a counter-arg adorno's "on the fetish character…" (he is basically wrong)

I do enjoy that aspect, but it'd be pretty worthless without everything else. For me, its great achievement is how seamlessly it does all of these different things.

It strikes me that when asked to justify something one falls back on the prestigious formal languages and values that are current in the larger conversation. So a lot of what I and Martin said is kind of analagous to an earlier generation of Defendaz of Pop talking about, for example, 'Sgt Pepper'. That is, we fall back on the larger cultural significance and importance of, eg, 'Once More with Feeling', and this can be a type of recuperation: ie, it's a way of persuading people: you should like THIS PARTICULAR INSTANCE because, despite your prejudices, SERIOUS AND IMPORTANT WORK CAN HAPPEN even amidst the apparent trash of mainstream tv.

And it occurs to me that the properly reflexive popist argument is (and thinking about this has helped me understand Mark S's delight in, eg, 'Charmed') that while Buffy may be The Beatles of pop tv, and 'Once More with Feeling' may be its 'Sgt Pepper' - the consequence of this is that 'Charmed' is that Monkees - and, as good popists, we know how much ambiguity and richness is to be found in even that - apparently compromised - career.

(Also: further thoughts on 'sophistication'. Let's think of it in terms of cooking. A sophisticated cook is one who knows about lots ingredients, and lots of ways of putting these together. And as a consequence, and maybe crucially, knows when leaving things out - or simplicity works best. A naive cook has a limited set of ingredients and consequently a more meagre sense of mixology, but, through contingency, may come across a previously unthought-of way of making, eg, a dynamite cheese and M'n'M sangwish. So the Beatles are sophisticated - The Stooges are naive [ok the Stooges were in no way naive, but you knowarrimean?])

You misspelled "despite". Cheers!

"South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" went a long way towards redeeming the musical before the musical Buffy episode, as did the revival of "Chicago".

I maintained an agressively intolerant attitude towards the American sitcom Friends for a number of years and only very recently found myself laughing hysterically at the show.

I will never read Harry Potter though.

PS Come on then Nabisco, where's this epic defence of Buffy?

Chicago
My Fair Lady
The Sound Of Music
West Side Story
The Gig
The Wild Party
Cats
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Hair
Jesus Christ Superstar
Bye Bye Birdie
Sweeny Todd
Into The Woods
Candide

And these are just the shows that immediately popped into my head.

Heh - I'll have to remember that one :)

"OMWF" was good a good episode, but saying it redefined/redeemed the musical is ludicrous IMO, particularly in the face of "South Park".

!!!

Andrew "Diddy" Webber.

(sorry.)

(BTW: "I've Got A Theory" is the second-best song.)

me : rockism :: Tom Petty : hip-hop

this redeems the entire history of galactic culture from the year dot

In other words, Dan may well be correct that within the conventions the South Park musical is better — but since what's always at issue in Buffy is the emotional-political pay-off of respecting the conventions (even when you have to, to save the world — or to "Redeem the Musical"), OMWF opens doors for musicals of the future which I don't think South Park the musical could have.

(I might add that the door for OMWF wz probably opened by Cop Rock, which I never saw and may *well* have been worse than Cats on any level ever: though I raised the peformance issue mainly to tease Dan on his single most throbbing hot button, I'm not at all sure that agreed-on technical quality can ever not be highly at issue when an artwork comes along which actually aims to shift conventions...)

(= this is also of course why the singing on Metal Box is better than the singing on Happy?, or indeed why the microdissonance of Tara's high register in fact suits the deep content of that song better than being in proper tune would) (if being in "being in tune" is a conventional representation of life w/o conflict, how does music represent a person whose identity is in conflict with her heart's desire?) (it's always been important to the excellence buffy that sarah michelle gellar is a bit of a rubbish actress, and that xander is if possible worse)

*the duration = 45 mins of TV time stuck between whatever nonsense is on before/after, or you can flick to in every dimension, or between the (non-musical) episodes before and after

A lot of abject nonsense is talked about above regarding musicals by the way. OMWF in no way rehabilitates the musical, its fans above clearly show this in rating above plenty of much better muscials which they are both unaware of and have little interest in seeing. Chicago does it by presenting spectacle. Moulin Rouge! does it by going for teh camp. South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut does it via the element of surprise and having at least three showstoppers. OMWF is a great technical achievement, a fantastic piece of writing which is also very important to the overarching plot of the series but its qualities as a musical are minor in its list of achievements.

=> it is the greatest art of all time QED

Anyway, Roseanne did this all years ago.

I'm just saying like.

The Robo Hunter musical was terrible. for some reason i re-read it a few months ago. ew. Sir Oswald Modroid. ew.

This reminds me that in some ways Buffy is sort of an anglicized anime -- the bizzare fantastic/trivial outsize character soap-opera meats space-opera thing's been happening in anime for years, and sometimes in mildly similar ways. I'm not awful familiar but a friend of mine was hella into anime and explained Tenchi to me in some depth and got me watching it for a while.

Buffy seems mildly less twee is the big difference becuz it has this sharp "why do i always fall for evil demons" undercurrent so the psychosexual stuff runs a bit deeper and darker I think.

Oh, wait, do we live thousands of miles apart or just hundreds?

(And I'm in Portland, Ore.)

(Also Buffy’s inability to sing spectacularly is absolutely integral to the thing’s success. If she could sing well it would suck.)

(I look forward to your epic defense.)

(The whole McGarrigle hyperextended family seems to me to be a polar opposite to this.)

Heh heh heh.

Okay. Let’s pretend for a second that there are two distinct impulses in the use of narrative, and that the history of Western civilization has in some sense been all about the movement from one to the other. The first impulse is that of myth and allegory, the impulse we find in religious stories and great epics. The second impulse is toward verisimilitude and plausibility, the impulse we find in hour-long cop dramas. Obviously the big transition has been from the former to the latter.

Which makes sense, because they’re suited to completely different types of lives. The life of the average Western person used to be a small and constrained thing: it contained very little information and a fixed number of experiences with little hope of change. Myth, epic, and allegory are perfect for this, because what’s coded into them are really powerful and adaptable ways of imagining the world in its broadest sense. The life of the average Western person now, though, is filled with information and opportunities for different kinds of experience. The new model of verisimilitude is uniquely suited to this, because what it offers are windows into portions of the world we might find or hope to find ourselves interacting with.

Except sometimes I think this new model only reflects the increasing narcissism of Western people, an overwhelming concern with the possible realities of our own lives at the expense of any thought about what meaningful things are actually happening within them. People like to praise narratives by saying they “ring true,” that they capture something real about what we do or might experience. But narrative shouldn’t exist only as a way of crystallizing or organizing reality, as a way of showing us what exists and giving us insight into how we might deal with that. It can do something more: it can look beneath reality. Instead of cataloging what happens and how it works, narrative can try to tell us something more universal about why.

One funny thing about Buffy is that while its form is all about the myth impulse, its content is actually all about a negotiation between the two. “Buffy” is the teenaged girl who longs, at first, to live in the world of verisimilitude; “the Vampire Slayer” is the girl who exists on the level of myth and allegory. The show sets itself up as myth and allegory, but what it really is is an extended thought experiment, one in which particular bits of the world of verisimilitude are dipped into the world of allegory to see what we might find out about them.

For example, a shocking number of Buffy episodes are based on the same premise: something happens that makes a given character behave differently. One of my favorite instances of this is an episode in which Xander, to all appearances, has his life taken over by an unexpectedly efficient and much better groomed Evil Xander. It’s eventually revealed, though, that there’s no “Evil” Xander: the two we’ve been seeing constitute different aspects of his identity, one bumbling and vulnerable and the other confident and capable. Episodes like this one—of which there are a whole awful lot—function as genre plots, yes, but more fundamentally as thought processes: the fantasy elements of the show allow Whedon to conduct endless lab experiments on the characters, exposing them not through tired constructions of the “real” but by casting them, one by one, into different parts of the myth impulse.

And the thing about myth is that everything is invested with great meaning. What Buffy’s negotiation of the line between myth and “reality” allows it to do is to effortlessly milk or not-milk that meaning. This is why I say it can “strike directly” at everything good about narrative—because it’s found this shortcut whereby it can dispense with the more meaningless dramas of the real and linger on, actually inflate, the bits that say something universal. This is half of how allegory works: by openly admitting that it’s a construction, that it sits on a stage, it can make every movement and event function not as the everyday “complexity” of a human being, but as some meaningful part of the complexity of something much bigger.

Which means shit can get dramatic on like near-religious levels.

This is where we come to the musical, which does everything I’m talking about above in one episode. Let’s not get misled: the brilliance of the thing lies not in anything it does for the form of the musical itself. Forget about that. What’s brilliant about it is how the episode adopts exactly the right form to accomplish what it wants to accomplish, which is to crystallize and draw out the overarching conflicts of each character at that particular moment. In what generic form are people allowed to stand on soapboxes and pour out the one thing that matters to them at the moment? The musical. So: insert musical demon. Dip the characters into another thought experiment: if this were a musical, what would they sing? This is why it’s important that Gellar doesn’t sing well: if she sang well this would be actual myth. What we get instead is the world’s biggest ass-kicker singing in a quavering voice the following killer of a Romantic plot scenario: (a) she sacrificed herself sort of to save the world but mostly to save a sister who wasn’t even real, (b) she believes she went to heaven, (c) her friends pulled her back not just into a life of death and duty but into a still-buried coffin, (d) she now has the additional responsibility of never letting them know that they did this, and (e) the whole endeavor is beginning to seem pointless and crushing.

None of which even compares to the soundless slow-mo shot of Buffy leaping from the tower in that initial sacrifice. Buffy is not dramatic by default; it’s dramatic when it matters. It means something when Buffy’s mother dies: apart from maybe the father on “Good Times” I’ve never seen a television character’s death treated so humanly. And because of that it matters doubly when Dawn’s zombie-resurrection of their mother taps at the door and their positions reverse: when Buffy momentarily gives up and reaches for the knob, and that sight makes Dawn call the whole thing off. A lot of this show now is about when and how people will give up.

Also it’s funny. How could it not be? It’s funny on the level of dialogue, yes, but so are a lot of shows. It’s funny on the level of self-referential and character-referential jokes, which isn’t quite as common, but that’s still not it. What allows it to be funny is precisely the way it’s so constructed. Those experiments in shifting characters, for instance, are bound to be amusing, and in surprising ways: witness the episode wherein Jonathan creates an alternate universe wherein he is basically the coolest thing ever, an episode that simply begins in this universe, with no explanation (we’ve barely even seen Jonathan before, unless we recall the episode wherein he gave Buffy an award for their graduating class having “the lowest mortality rate in Sunnydale High history”). Or witness the episode in which the whole gang, suddenly amnesiac, try to reconstruct their identities from the available evidence—a hilarious episode that nonetheless ends with Tara’s discovery that Willow has just done one of the most childish and despicable things I have ever seen a major character on a television show do.

Yes, it helps if you can laugh at the level of the line as well. It helps if you can laugh, in “Hush,” when the characters, rendered mute, meet to compare notes on why: you have to laugh at Giles’s childish drawings of demons ripping people’s hearts out, or the fact that Buffy’s pantomime for staking is interpreted as masturbatory. (Note to Buffy-fans: I laughed more at the ridiculously pleased expression on Riley’s face when he smashed everything but the box Buffy was actually pointing at.)

This is the part where I run out of steam and worry that all of the above was dry unconvincing wank that doesn’t actually make sense.

Actually, he's been around lurking in the backround from the beginning. He just never had any speaking role til that episode.

I guess this officially makes me a sadstress.

actually nicole he had some incidental dialogue as early as . . . *shrivels up from extreme sadness*

I guess my position is more that Buffy is a comic on TV. It's not a criticism really, but it's probably why I'm underwhelmed by it having spent far far too much of my teens and twenties reading mainstream comics, something that probably isn't true of Nabisco and JtN.

p.s. Jonathan first shows up in S2's "Inca Mummy Girl." He's not named in that episode, though.

Re: Comics. I actually spent a lot of my youth (ie up to 14 when I cancelled my sub to 2000AD and started getting 'Smash Hits' and 'NME' instead) reading comics, and once proposed that 'Spider Man' was a kind of proto-Buffy. But Pete told me I was wrong. :(

NB I'm not saying "oh comics did it first so they must be best". I'm saying the kind of ordinary/myth crossover stuff that excites Nabisco is something I'm burned out on because of long exposure to comics (I also gave up at 14 but alas it didn't last). BTvS is quite possibly the best ever mainstream comic, more so maybe for not being one, but I'm too knackered with that kind of storytelling to care. (At least this explains to me why I can watch and like BTvS but not really enjoy it, deep-down.)

I totally agree. I just like to have a rational comeback when people look at me like I've grown an extra head for loving Buffy. I find that people respond better to a reasoned response than a nonrational one. Except for politicians, of course.

But they were a band...oh.

Tom, you're absolutely right: I never ever read comics, and a lot of what I like about Buffy is the epic comic-style scope of the larger plots. This same sort of epic melodrama is a lot of what I got into about Sailor Moon, as well.

HAHA with one sentence crushes his well-argued post and consigns it to the "sweaty-palmed otaku" bin!!

What I really don't buy in Nabisco's post is this:

The life of the average Western person used to be a small and constrained thing: it contained very little information and a fixed number of experiences with little hope of change. Myth, epic, and allegory are perfect for this, because what’s coded into them are really powerful and adaptable ways of imagining the world in its broadest sense. The life of the average Western person now, though, is filled with information and opportunities for different kinds of experience. The new model of verisimilitude is uniquely suited to this, because what it offers are windows into portions of the world we might find or hope to find ourselves interacting with.

I think this is an overly optimistic, egregiously urban-slanted view of Western civilization, particularly in the United States where the current zeitgeist seems to be an outright rejection of external influences and information sources. It explains why overeducated Ivy-types like "Buffy" but can't possibly explain the widespread commercial appeal (which I think lies much more in the same reason "Alias" does so well, ie cute girl in fantasy situation kicking butt and looking good while doing it).

Dan, keep in mind that that part is not about recent history but about the centuries-long transition from early myth to contemporary cop dramas. If there's an "urban slant" to comparing the lives of first-millenium subsistence farmers and television viewers, the slant is the very fact that we now have such a thing as urban at all!

My argument is that life in the US at the moment is WAY more insular and xenophobic than your initial premise. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him connect to the Internet, etc.

("Information" does not have to equal useful information in our modern sense. Just information, period.)

Dude, you're describing the MO of all Marvel comics since the 60s (and really all superhero comics since the death of the Silver Age), making me think Tom is even more correct in his assessment (ie, it's a comic book and I'm kind of burnt out on comic books). This also explains why my wife hates it (she can't STAND comic books, largely because she finds the storytelling deeply infantile and off-putting).

I remember when he posted to RACMX back when he was writing an X-Book and people were simultaneously kissing his ass and demonizing Scott Lobdell for destroying the spirit of the Xbooks, but using examples of things Wa!d had done as examples of Lobdell's crimes. ("Cannonball sulks in a tree" being the big example that leaps to mind...)

(Granted, Lobdell had some CLUNKER ideas too, but at least criticize the guy for the things he actually DID...)

It's titled that but it isn't written that way.

Okay, so basically you're saying that Buffy is great because it is the perfect blend of mythic storyttelling and prosaic life experience, neatly blending two competing storytelling impulses, right?

And here's the thing: no, I'm not really saying that. I dunno, I was groping around this area when I was trying to make that long post, and I don't think I got close enough to what I wanted. It's not a "blend" of those two things. In some sense it's actively about the one and the other and how they intersect. It sets up these big machines to plunge people back and forth between myth, thought-experiment, and reality: they're almost specifically not blended, because it's the distances and the drops between them where half of the show is taking place.

Probably there are comic books out there that do this as well, but whatever: I don't like comic books.

I keep wondering what the non-Buffy-fans here would think of the parody episode: Xander, who is feeling ignored, goes off and winds up stopping a bunch of jock zombies from destroying the high school; this is never noticed by any of the others, who appear here and there bustling around in this caricatured version of a Big Buffy Apocalypse Plot, complete with hokey-looking demon and over-dramatic aftermath.

Re: "average Western person" this has absolutely nothing to do with Buffy and like I said was just a way of talking about myth but come fucking on you guys, are you seriously arguing that the absolute flat-average citizen of the Western world does not have more access to information and more opportunities for different experiences than an illiterate pre-Rennaisance farmer? Ten minutes with a television, ten minutes in an elementary school, reading any two books -- these things give you more raw input than your average myth-era person would get in a year! It isn't until relatively recently that the average person ever travelled more than a short distance from home. It isn't until relatively recently that the average person was expected to know how to read, much less read any more than one book (the Bible: a myth-type book).

Comics series by the 70s became soap operas interspersed with fight scenes and complex continuities which moved on the fantastical macro-plots. To the committed fan it was the emotional lives of the characters that kept them reading as much as the fantasy drama. All this stuff can be seen in BTvS - in fact the tropes Nitsuh is talking about (stories where characters change / alternate worlds and 'imaginary stories') are utterly stock in superhero comics. So are some of the overarching plotlines above - the gradual transformation of Spike has been less subtly attempted in many long-running superhero titles; characters darkening and being corrupted by their increasing power is also fairly common. (The rigid character set of superhero comics also allowed for formal experimentation too - dialogue-free issues, or all-splash-page issues, etc.)

No, because I think it's a completely meaningless point on par with starting an argument by saying "Water is wet."

Dunno if you watch Angel, N., but your point is illustrated by the first thing that the resurrected Holtz does in S3.

I think I've said all along that Buffy may well be superior to every superhero comic ever: I don't know because I'm so exhausted with that entire style of storytelling I can't tell what's good or bad anymore. My point is only that Buffy may well seem less revelatory to someone who has read a lot of them. I can totally imagine them loving Buffy in a "Damn, THIS is what all those comics I read were trying to achieve" sense.

(I'd love Martin S to answer some of this stuff cos he's the only person I know who loved superhero comics and now loves Buffy.)

"superhero comics since the 60s" != "a 70s superhero comic". Spider-Man and Watchmen are datapoints on the same end of the storytelling continuum, particularly recent Spider-Man.

I'm not sure I understand why this should be a major sticking point.

Cause my brain goes "that's what you're missing!!!" Maybe not "overarching plot" in the sense of extended conflicts, but overarching characters and character backgrounds are essential to it.

Got it. That makes a great deal of sense to me, actually. I only see Buffy as revelatory in the sense that it's quality TV -- I guess I haven't seen any other TV series attempting to tell that kind of story with sustained success.

Spider-Man and Watchmen are datapoints on the same end of the storytelling continuum, particularly recent Spider-Man.

Haven't read Spider-Man recently, but I would say there's almost a difference in kind between the early Marvel comics (justifiably lauded at the time) and the work of people like Alan Moore. For one thing, the depth of reference to other texts in Buffy is closer to Moore's work that to any given example of the golden era of comics (quick example - in a S7 episode, one minor character begins to quote Invictus when the building he's in explodes - obv. reference to Oklahoma City, but only to the clued-in).

Yr second post: Buffy's failing for me, in that case, is that the characters as presented in any given individual episode do not appeal enough for me to care about whatever overarching character arc there may be. And the long-term character development within a fantastic context is above anything else what Buffy is taking from superhero comics so I am used to the idea.

I am a child: what was Claremont's achievement? I have a vague idea of it as sticking a chuck of expository dialogue and soap opera antics into the fertile field of angsty superheroes and expanding the market. This leads pretty directly to "I wish I could be writing a soap opera, but only superhero comics sell" titles, such as Devin Greyson's wretched Titans.

Also the preponderance of superhero titles is a problem in itself. See Warren Ellis' analogy about walking into a bookstore and finding that 90% of the titles are nurse novels.

Mark S' point is good: 24 is the best ever 2000AD story for this exact reason. (and is better than BTvS for the same reasons 2000AD is better than X-Men i.e. ultimately, characterisation is for laym0rz)

Just because some people do things poorly doesn't mean that they aren't worth doing.

My point of contention is not and has never been that the amount of information available to the average person today is greater than it was 500 years ago. In fact, I find that to be so much of a truism that it wouldn't even occur to me to state it (hence my "I think that's a meaningless point" comment).

My entire initial point was based on reading your description of modern life and thinking, "Wait, the person he's describing isn't so much the average person as much as it is the people I know who live (or desperately want to live) in cities." That threw the entire premise of the argument off for me, largely because in a post designed to explain why YOU like Buffy, you gave a general dissertation of the merits of Buffy that seemed to come from the standpoint of fandom in general and I was questioning whether Buffy fandom actually had that commonality.

(N.B. I don't think this rhetorical device is necessarily a flaw in Nab's argument.)

Let's not get into the blind alley down which Watchmen leads. I like it much better than Mark S does (and not just because Alan is a dear old friend - and I was matey with Dave Gibbons a bit too), but it has nothing useful to do with this, and the idea that it is better comics or even richer in textual terms than Kirby's FF or Ditko's Spider-Man seems to me to be completely misguided.

(the relationship between eg x-men or jla or the mutant ninja turtles as collectives to all rock/rap groups evah as collectives is btw central to my theory of everything... i am not anti-comic at all on this thread, tho not very learned abt same...)

So if I like Buffy and have never gotten any enjoyment whatsoever out of comics apart from a few Sailor Moons, are there any accessible comics out there that would change my mind about this?

One of my problems with comics is that the space constraints mean the characters never get to talk about anything. This is why I say they seem like pure myth to me: there's a lot of necessary exposition and then the high-drama myth stuff where characters make godlike pronouncements of purpose and such. When superhero comics get translated to film, it's usually in a motion-picture way that's all about the high-drama myth stuff, only adapted to the verisimilitude impulse so that audiences won't think it's silly. Maybe part of the appeal of Buffy is that it's not always stilted for the purpose of the core drama -- it's stilted to allow characters to sit there and talk about themselves in a lot of naturalistic ways comics can't offer. For instance, I cannot imagine a comic book ever dealing with human awkwardness in the ways Buffy has.

One problem with this whole discussion is that it keeps drawing us toward the premises and construction of the show, as opposed to the "fact" that it's frequently just really well-made and satisfying. I'm not sure how to talk about that aspect of things with people who haven't watched the show. But I could make an endless list of jokes and plot turns and conflicts and great moments that have amazed and/or entertained me more than anything on television since Twin Peaks.

(Cross-posting note: okay, Martin is following up on the thing I guess I couldn't get across adequately. It's not just a "blend" of myth and reality, it's some interaction that's going on between the two. I didn't want to claim that this didn't happen in comics, because I don't read comics, but I think maybe Martin-who-does is seeing this in the same way. They don't just co-exist and they're not just integrated, the two levels are constantly bouncing off of one another and reflecting one another -- the show spends a lot of time sort of triangulating between the two to get at what it wants to get at, which is almost always something powerful and abstract: not just about "reality" but about how reality works.)

Hmm. Martin, you're much more of a comics guy than I, but I frankly don't understand how you can say that.

AAARGH NO! I am not disagreeing with the point you made (people now are more informed than people 500 years ago). I am disagreeing with the point I read (people now are uniformly well-informed).

Martin: Don't forget POWER PACK! (ahem)

A) Simpsons, Star Trek TNG, Law and Order: keep characters constant, introduce "commentary" on the world by one or another means, episode by episode. Insular episodic with a few special events and an expanding universe of mythology to draw on. I.e. high-concept plot-driven.

B) Cheers, Ellen, Friends, most sitcoms: Character interplay driven, explores and plays with different permutations of relationships, throws people at one another and sees what sparks fly.

C) ER, Xena, Power Rangers, Dragonballz, Alias: Fantasy driven, the same things happen every episode and it's the repetition rather than the development which provides appeal; consequence free-escape even where there *are* story arcs. Neither characters nor world permute much.

D) Soap Operas: characters constantly permute but in the same ways, everything comes and goes but the simple premises of the world itself.

E) X-Files, Murder One, NYPD Blue: characters and world both change in linked arcs that run a full season. But the arcs themselves are constant -- i.e. big secret in X-files that hints and clues are dropped about, Scully doesn't believe but Mulder does eventually both believe and they discover the truth... or DO THEY?

F) Buffy: Characters and world change in linked seasonal arcs as with E) but each season the arcs are different. For example, I don't know a single other show initially set in high-school which successfuly survived its main characters' graduation. Each season there's a different big-bad but they're of essentially different characters, psychological things externalized, but different psychological things. The central thing at stake is the group itself, relationships holding firm --> holding firm against evil. But each season the group itself transforms -- the dynamics aren't like a sitcom where the group of friends is taken for granted or etc. but rather where the nature of friendship is what is constantly interrogated. This means that each arc, each big-bad, each crisis manages to be something new and different: there is no "typical" buffy episode, at least post-season 2 I think.

(also it is the only one with HORSES)

the actual substantive pt sterling is making i basically concur with

Also, these comics are far more moving than Watchmen. Alan gets too much into writing about these sorts of characters, and not enough about these specific characters. There's nothing in Watchmen with the emotional clout, and fine judgement of scale and pace after the huge epic we'd just had, of FF51 (This Man...This Monster!). Alan is a more educated, in literary terms, more thoughtful and maybe more intelligent writer, and I admire his work a lot, but I think many are too easily fooled by a bit of easy cynicism about superheroes and a lot of technical skill and some intelligence into seeing something of inherently greater value than more mainstream superheroics. (I'd also rank Grant Morrison's pretty conventional JLA above Watchmen, despite the art.)

Nabisco, I don't want to get evangelical, and I think you're right about a lot of things comics rarely do as well as TV (though Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid In The World really nails a lot of these things, especially around awkwardness in relationships), but like any form, it has its own strengths. There are collections available of the Krazy Kat sunday pages, which I rate as the peak of the medium. If you want a more expansive series (because there is obviously nothing inherent in the form of comics that limits them to 20-page episodes), something like the 28 volume, 300 pages a book, Lone Wolf And Cub series might appeal. I wouldn't wish to overdo comparisons with Buffy (this is a samurai series, very in the Kurosawa mould), it does have the same breadth and overarching direction - i.e. the whole 8,500 pages does make up a single story, albeit with many digressive episodes. (I won't go on about this here, as, I'm surprised to realise, I have little handle on your literary tastes, which makes making recommendations harder.)

http://www.nbmpub.com/comicslit/proust/remembrancecov.jpg

one of the reasons I like Andromeda is that it hasn't decided exactly what its going to be and there's this funny feeling that lots of interesting things are happening offstage, so to speak: like there was no federation anymore, and they were trying to rebuild it, then sometime between episodes suddenly there was.

the sense of the hidden cosmic forces and man's will and fate etc. without it getting turned into some toying TNG Q Id with an attitude thang.

Mainly episodes are like these in-depth power politics exercises in paranoia and sometimes they're nothing like that at all and *everything changes*. The show is studiously the opposite of all that "prime directive" etc. and somewhat millenarian and fevered.

And Buffy doesn't stand alone in Sterling's scheme: Babylon 5 kicked its ass here.

- Nabisco makes a comment comparing storytelling from ancient times to now.
- Dan reads it as comparing two styles of contemporary storytelling and answers accordingly.
- Nabisco says, "No no, I meant this wider scope."
- Dan says, "Okay. But is the blend/contrast/counterpoint of these two styles the thing that attracts you to the show? That's the overall sense I got from your post and I agree with Tom that anyone burnt out on this in the comic book arena isn't going to be as enraptured with the show."
- Nabisco says, "But you disagree with this fundamental truth I laid out."
- Dan says, "I find expressing that fundamental truth uninteresting in the context of this discussion."
- Nabisco says, "It is too interesting; why are you harping on it? It isn't even my major point."
- Dan thinks to himself "B-b-but you're the one who brought it up again!" but writes, "Taken the way you meant it, it's a fundamental fact that I think could have been safely assumed for the purposes of this discussion and I question why you even brought it up, because for me to even think it had importance I had to think of it in a much more specific way than you were thinking."
- Chris says, "Dan, that was just as obvious as what you're criticizing Nabisco for."
- Dan says, "You're right, Chris."
- Nabisco say, "How can you say that my position is an irrefutable fact, then disagree with it?"
- Dan says, "AAAAARGH!" and bangs his head against the wall.

Can I still be confused, though?

Oh, and Buffy Rulez.

i) Blakes 7. (in terms of arcs-in-series/character development/sterling's schema) (Spike vs Avon fite)

ii) Buffy and ILX. A lot of people who post on ILX have never really got involved in another interweb message board/community before and so some of the stuff that happens on ILX - trolling, group intelligence, in-jokes, crappiness, rapid reaction - is really new and exciting to them and merits lots of thort. A lot of other people who post here have posted in lots of other bbs/communities before but still think ILX is something vaguely special. I think you can substitute "ILX" for "Buffy" and "message boards" for "fan-attracting genre fiction". I would not presume that people new to an idea somehow have a lesser perspective than people not-new to it, maybe if anything the reverse. But the parallel struck me.

eg. has any other show apart from Dallas ever seriously introduced "...and then I woke up and realised it was all a dream" as a post-facto potential ontological basis? Has any other show period introduced a central character five seasons in and contrived an explanation for how they might have been there all along? Has any other show exploited the musical format in order to actually deepen the complexities of the characters' relationships to eachother?

This is not the only reason that I like Buffy, but it's a big part of it. Other non-realistic genre-shows exhibit what I might call "constrained implausibility" - by which I mean that once you get over the central implausible novum (witchcraft, the paranormal, space travel) the show's universe strives to render itself internally consistent, believable, to some extent "plausible" (eg. if witchcraft did exist in the real world then all of the plots which flow from it make sense). SF in particular has been proud of this state-of-affairs from Jules Verne onwards. Star Trek and Middle-Earth are two very obvious examples of attempts to fashion universes which are virtually self-sustaining, with fans actually being able to converse in languages native to the show as a demonstration of their intimate understanding of the show's rules.

Buffy, I sense, feels no such constraints of plausibility; at both a narrative and formal level the show reserves the right to change at will, contradict itself, break with its own narrative traditions (hence the musical episode) and in all ways push the boundaries of consistency. And it's not laziness that is motivating them to write the show in this manner, but rather a perverse desire to add more and more balls to the ones they're already juggling (the "and then I woke up and realised it was all a dream" device, for example, was not deployed for convenience but rather to deliberately introduce doubt and uncertainty into the show's self-consciousness).

The writers can do this with confidence in the continuing faith of fans because they know Buffy-fans place little emphasis on the Buffy-universe as a coherent entity; the physiological and spiritual make-up of a vampire makes for countless interesting characters and plot developments, but it is the application and not the template itself that is important; likewise, there is no formal narrative structure that any given Buffy episode would be wise to follow in order to produce the most consumer satisfaction.

What fans do invest faith in is the consistency of the characters and their personalities; whatever peril the characters face - from demons magical to personal - and however they are presented as facing it (comically, seriously, musically etc.), we can trust that each character will respond in a manner that is eminently appropriate (or, rather, truthful) to their psychological make-up. In fact, while plot developments are often flippant, the amount of effort that is put into gradually and sensitively moulding the personalities of each character is clearly painstaking. As a result, characters such as Spike, Willow and Buffy herself have over the course of the series been totally transformed, while remaining ineffably themselves at all times.

By placing so much of the show's core within the characters themselves, Buffy does for interpersonal relationships what SF lit. did for sociology throught the second half of the 20th century, helping us to better perceive ourselves by placing us in an endless range of metaphorical situations. And, because it feels no compulsion to preserve its own conditions of possibility, it possesses a much wider arsenal than any other single fantastic universe.

It is interesting the explosion of fantasy television in the last 15 years. Next Generation is to blame, and the trek fandom that precipitated the Trek continuity's resurrection. I hated the episodes where they used it to analyse the characters relationships though. so maybe that's why i care even less for Buffy than I do for Next Gen etc.

Or the same old knot that you haven't seen before.

My main objection to Buffy - it is v. poor 'horror'

My position is more like - yes there are differences between Orange Juice and The Smiths but ultimately it's still four lads with fringes and guitars, and if you're burned out on lads with fringes and guitars you won't like them much (even if they are the best of their kind ever ever).

To stop niggling at this particular point for a moment, though -

I like JtN's points about the embodiment of metaphor. But what exactly is gained by embodying the metaphor? (i.e. assuming Buffy and Dawson's had equally sharp scripting why would Buffy be better?) I'm not saying nothing is gained - I'd like to read Jerry's ideas about what, exactly, because mine are very vague.

Andrew - I was thinking about in action/superhero comics where characterisation tends to be a waste of time even if done well (because it usually stifles something comics are very good at - pulse-pounding page-turning excitement). I also liked the characters in Ghost World, too much to want to see the film in the end.

1) Makes more spectacular (in the sense of vivid) drama. Compare someone "wrestling with their demons" with someone wrestling with a DEMON! In a fun, pop way, Buffy is much more thrilling than Dawsons, even though they are often about the same thing. (Cf: the moment in 'The Hours' where Julianne Moore's character is contemplating suicide. They HAVE to embody the metaphor of her slipping under (for those who haven't seen it, the room fills up with river water - yes, it IS pretty cheesy) - because the alternative is a long film about a lonely woman looking pretty glum.

2) Allows you to pursue the consequences of an idea much more vividly because it's embodied. In a sense myth is deeper than positivistic science cos it has better characters you can think about more easily than abstract qualities. If I said "Gregor Samsa awoke one day feeling pretty lousy" we would not have learnt very much new. By saying "transformed into a giant cockroach" the issue is defamiliarised: we might be able to approach the subject in a new way (or not).

Wouldn't it be great if she had a younger sister. Okay we can magic her in. (Hello Crisis on Infinite Earths).

I know its called Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but we've shown that vampires have the capacity to love (Angel / Spike) so isn't it more Buffy the Vampire Murderer. Oh - let's make the villains all demons.

Wouldn't it be great that when Buffy was resurrected she felt yanked out of heaven. Oh, let's kill her again. (She's dies three time for chrissake).

And don't tell me there is any well written logic behind the Watchers council (council if there is only one Slayer)....

So it exists within its own internal, often pretty inconsistant, logic., Fine - so far so genre. BUt in putting Buffy as a genre apart above is completely forgetting that these kind of character developments are the whole point of the post-Bochco genre soap. Hill STreet Blues was all about it, er is all about it. Characters come, characters go, they marry, they have affairs, they leave. The only difference is this vague idea of verisimilitude that Nabisco refers to above - but of course cop shops and er aren't in any way realistic. They are as much fantasies (every crime gets solved even in MYPD Blue!)

However what is argued above seems to suggest that its fantasy element allows Buffy's slow developing soap element to be in some way more realistic which seems to be a vaguely contradictory argument.

Oh - and my argument re Spiderman with Jerry was regarding the emphasis of the comic. The comic is three quarters costumed crime fighting, one quarter soap. Buffy has a very different balance and NO SECRET IDENTITY (v.v important)

Embodied metaphors = lack of trust in audience to get it? Trust in audience to feel clever when they do get it. (Buffy, like Indie after all appears to want its fans to feel clever for liking it).

Sorry this has all been a bit slapdash.

I don't understand the question. Buffy has never (to my knowledge) has an episode that was revealed _outside of that episode_ to have not happened, so it's lagging Dallas in that respect.

Tom - No, you're right, I was responding to Mark S.

(Come to think of it, I saw The Sting last night.)

A. Last night, in a dream.

pete is otm here, i fear.

I like the look of the Nipper's contributions, though I don't think I care that much for what he's defending. His words on 'love' are eloquent.

I think I find the Nipper more interesting than many of the things he finds interesting.

Anyway, way back up when Alan said that the Buffyverse was, on balance, internally consistent, he was right. The "inconsistencies" Pete brings up can only be viewed as inconsistencies if you never expect the core parameters of the fictional world to change, but as has been shown time and time again, the characters in the show are working off of a set of assumptions which we think are true as readers but can change as the characters grow and as the writers come up with new plot ideas.

Dawn is an extended exercise in retroactive continuity (aka "retconning"), something that anyone who read superhero comics EVER for any amount of time should recognize ("Crisis" is the ultimate example, but don't forget the rebirth of Jean Grey). And yes, the return of Bobby Ewing on "Dallas" was the ultimate TV retcon.

Anyway, I think Buffy is at its best when the characters are making fun of each other. Inevitably the best scene of every episode is the research scene.

"cleverness" seems to be an idea we-the-brainy reach for when we want to rationalise the effectiveness of a magic — and classically it is therefore also a counterspell for the brainy to turn to (cf Alan and Dan warding off an apparent invocation of Novelty-as-Power with an invocation of Scholarship-as-CounterPower...)

I think Buffy has tremendous emotional force, but this manifests as something like sexiness in a person, surely? And I think the consonance between formal tactics/strategies and the content runs VERY deep, which means that you often have several non-identical angles on the same element, which gives you a lot to talk about (richness, practically speaking ie it's rich if you don't run out of things to say)

(a spell which works on everyone = reality!!)

but i haven't inserted the most recent set of changes so no one gets to see it yet

(btw - did you read that link WHAT WD BUFFY DO? above?!)

The whole thing feels like a stage, on which the only real things are the characters. The props are changed to allow the characters to react to them -- different metaphors thrown at them, their reality constantly shifted around them to check their responses. And that's always acknowledged. Dawn is retroactively scripted in, sure, but then look at what the entire next season is about: they know she's been retroactively scripted in, and they spend quite a bit of time working specifically around the idea of whether they should value that fake scripting, working out what she should mean to them. Buffy kills herself rather than sacrifice what she's fully aware is a fake sister and a set of fake memories.

This is sort of what I meant about the whole thing taking place in the drops between verisimilitude and metaphor. The metaphors and the constructions are always becoming concrete, and the concrete is always becoming metaphor, and the difference between Buffy and all of the sci fi and fantasy I've read or seen (no comix, yes) is that in Buffy this is the substance of the thing, this is acknowledged and talked about and forms the basis of what the characters deal with every day.

Which is part of why the show was aging well for a while, I think: because the "world" was in constant flux and the characters were wearying and changing in response to it, becoming basically anchors in the midst of more and more fluctuating material. This is also why the coming and going of characters feels way more significant in Buffy than elsewhere, because they're basically dropping in from the cardboard scenery onto the stage where things happen, and this process is actually really negotiated and constructed (see Tara, Anya).

All of the bits that come to mind that I want to talk about are from the present season, and I can't spoil them for you guys!

Actually, (correct me if you think I'm wrong here) but that is *precisely* how 'consistency' works in other formats, specifically comix. For example, in Crisis the point was "today we need to clean up all of this messy non-continuity, so we'll just destroy all of the universe!

Not that I'm necessarily dissing you here, N ; I still think that mark s is right that the fact that stuff this is on TV makes it worth it QED.

You keep saying, "Other media do these tricks in favor of the plot, but Buffy does it in favor of the characters." If, however, the series is really about the expanding/evolving relationships between the characters and how their experiences shape them and their reactions, then the character development/interaction is the real overarching plot of the show and the comics parallel stands. (Hell, this is also the type of thing you find in genre fan-fiction as well as things like the Doctor Who original novels, plus shows like Xena.)

The Jean Grey retcon was done precisely so that the original X-Men could be reunited after something like 18 years of being apart and Louise Simonson could explore how the intervening years and experiences had altered/stressed/warped their relationships, only instead of resolving everything over the span of one episode/one season, events played themselves out over several years, culminating in one character's ex-wife going apeshit crazy and attempting to overrun New York with demons. (Actually, if you look at the plot synopses of X-Factor and Uncanny X-Men over those years, they read a lot like a season of Buffy.)

Although, did Ned read comic books?

I do want to say that getting the briliant positive criticism that's on show here from Jerry, Nabisco, Tim F, Mark S and others makes the show even better for me, and makes me love it even more. Thank you all.

In terms of superhero stuff: a couple of years worth of Excalibur for some reason, a few of the scattered nouvelles graphique (all usual suspects, Watchmen, Dark Knight, etc.). A couple of the Sandmans, no more. The majority of comic stuff I've read is straight up Fantagraphics.

I'm interested in it because I think it's in some ways an exemplary ILx thread. A lot of the time I feel in the intractable mood I described above: arguing about aesthetics is a mugs' game unless you want to upset people and cause confusion. Even under ideal communicative Habermasian conditions, nobody is ever going to agree on "Good Taste" or "Importance" or "The Canon" because people in liberal democracies aren't obliged to agree on what culture is for. And in this mood I feel a lot of threads might as well have titles like "what's best: hammers or spanners?" - making absolute claims for locally practical tools.

So looking back on this thread I see a Ned asking the question, lots of Buffistas saying imaginative and interesting things, and then some detractors saying, well these things you say are very imaginative and interesting - but not true.

I think a lot of the claims Martin, Mark, Nabs and myself make are various ways of suggesting "we love it because it does something new" - whether this means being exceptionally clever, or deep, or metaphorical or mythic. And a lot of the detractors are saying, in various ways, "your suggestion isn't valid because you haven't considered enough evidence for its novelty" - ie we haven't looked closely enough at the history of the musical, comic books, other genre tv - where this kind of novelty goes on all the time. I would suggest this is a kind of scientific method of argument: a hypothesis is tested on greater and greater amounts of data and found to be adequate or lacking.

And that's when we get to the moment of intractability: conversation stops. The Buffistas say: "why should I have to justify my love: one should only justify what we are obliged to - ie what interferes with someone else's happiness". That is another way of saying that culture is a private pursuit, unarguable - and that what argument is good for is resolution of shared aims and goals - for example politics or science. One justifies a business proposal to a community - but ideally you don't have to justify your marriage proposal to that same community (unless you have very overbearing parents).

Well, I'm seduced by this idea - but I like talking about things I love, and ending the conversation here seems unsatisfactory. So I wonder if we can test the claim to novelty in some way that doesn't rely on scouring the world of culture for things we hadn't considered. What about if we say "I particularly love Buffy because it has expanded the imaginative possibilities for popular tv series" - ie we love the shadows we think futurity casts across it. Now I suggest we test this proposal less on its truth claims as on its performance, its success as a predictive hunch. Let's see how it runs.I would say its the hope of Buffistas that the kind of drama that comes after Buffy will be more able to try to do things in new ways because of its example - just as The Beatles expanded what was imaginable for a pop band (or a bunch of scruffy scousers)to do. Now maybe this is no more than a way of saying "let's wait and see" - but I prefer it to intractability.

You seem to want a discussion to happen around what you love and why you love it. So "we love it because it does something new" is the wrong tack, is asking for people to say "actually it's not, really". "We love it because it does something amazing" would likely be more fruitful, wouldn't it?

Novelty = not so great anyway, except novelty records.

New != amazing though, surely?

A: "Wow! This record is amazing!"
B: "I don't think so."
A: "..."
B: "So, what about Leeds, then?"

ie: talking about novelty suggests you are placing an experience within a story with a past and future - a history you might feasibly share with another person."Amazing" just says "it fires certain neurons in muh brane".

To illustrate: we might say Flaubert wrote an amazing book. Well we might recommend it to someone on that basis - but they would have to bear in mind whether they trust your judgement etc. But if we say: Flaubert wrote a new kind of novel - we might be able to redescribe the history of literature. It depends what you want to do - and I kind of presume people on ILx want to have interesting conversations, as well as getting recommendations for things they might like.

This very thread proves that, when it works best, the conversation goes more like :

"Wow! This show is amazing!"
"What's amazing about it?"
"Well.... [long or short explication]"
etc etc.

I'm all for discussions of the history of lit/art, but without the other part, the part where people describe what's happening to them when they're anmazed, then your interesting discussion runs the risk of becoming Art History Top Trumps.

In the convo you quote, it's the historical comparison bit which kills the discussion!

Profiler
New York Undercover
Every soap opera ever written
Ally Mcbeal
Friends
Frasier
Will and Grace
Malcolm in the Middle
Crossing Jordan
Judging Amy
Star Trek: DS9
Babylon 5
Roseanne

Those are just off the top of my head, mind you.

Anyway just to be clear: I don't think anyone is denying that the formal devices of Buffy aren't groundbreaking inventions -- it's what they point at and how they're employed that makes the show great. As evidenced, quite obviously, by the fact that some of us don't care at all for those devices in other genre contexts!

However, in the interests of harmonizing narrative and novelty we could talk about the "seasonal arc" aspect of BtVS, since that's a reasonably interesting and innovative approach to series television (at least in the U.S.). - J, Buffy fan

Nabisco our bit of the conversation has closed down because the only way we'll agree, I think, is by both of us having read/watched exactly the same cultural material and it's obvious that isn't the case: I don't want to watch any more BTvS than the 7 or 8 episodes I've seen; you don't want to read a load of comics.

I guess I'm trying to say, "I've seen that, give me something else."

The idea of "Buffy has expanded the possibilities of TV" seems to require a long-term view, which ILX is capable of giving, but only in the long-term! Even then it wouldn't tell us whether Buffy itself was worth watching in a non-historical sense, surely?

If it's a successful theory then pop-tv will change in some interesting ways - ie the theory will have convinced a lot of people. It's not a gamble that pays off in the short-term, but I think it's a more interesting game than the positivist/consensualist: let's keep arguing back and forth until we reach bedrock reality/complete agreement/stop talking/start crying/fiting.

The first moment at which I thought "Wow Buffy is sort of brilliant": big evil Spike, just escaped from captivity and geared up to wreak havoc, storms into Buffy and Willow's dorm room, finds Willow alone, and leaps over to, you know, suck her blood. Cut to commercial. [Insert commercials.] The show re-opens with Spike sitting on the edge of Willow's bed with his head in his hands, and suddenly the conversation has shifted 180 degrees into an impotence parody: "I'm sure it happens to lots of vampires," says Willow, and then "It's not me, is it? I'm bitable, right?" (Spike has had a chip put in his head that keeps him from harming humans.) On the obvious level this is disorienting and funny -- the nail-biting expectation of a sudden Buffy rescue dropping away completely into something else entirely, something that's much more bafflingly funny for its unexpectedness. On a better level there's the fact that all Buffy action inevitably drops away into negotiation of the characters' psyches, a life-or-death action moment turning into two characters sitting awkwardly together with their own issues: Spike with the impotent rage he's always had -- which has just become a literal impotence that will extend for a long time to come -- and Willow with her early-collegiate feelings of being somewhat abandoned and unappealing (boyfriend Oz has left her, Buffy's always out, and now even the vampires don't want to bite her). This was my first realization of quite how non-fixed the roles in Buffy are: here's vampire-vs-human, yes, but that conflict is completely secondary to the characters themselves, who can in fact let the whole vampire-vs-human conflict drop entirely because they're momentarily too struck by their own mundane problems to have the heart for it.

The Dawn arc: synopsis. One day Buffy suddenly has a younger sister. This is rather funny and fun, because it's evident that the show is toying with you: she's just suddenly in the house at the end of an episode, and you're not sure what she's even meant to be until she and Buffy grow exasperated with one another and both yell "Mom!" at the same time -- the next episode begins with her writing in her diary very girlishly about her life, including such tidbits as a massive crush on Xander. More constructions that are obviously constructions: we know she doesn't belong there, we know this is an experiment that will end up being -- both plot-wise and theme-wise -- about why she's there. Plot-wise her introduction has a large purpose: blah blah blah she's the key to a gate to hell given human form and inserted into Buffy's life so that Buffy will protect it from evil god who wants to use it to open gate blah blah blah. But what it comes down to is a much bigger question of why we care about anyone or anything, what makes something "real." In the end it turns out that Dawn might have to be killed to save the world, and everyone but Buffy works on the show-logic: she's not real in the first place, so why not? Whereas Buffy's line of thinking is different and interestingly maternal. The obvious maternal bit is that Dawn is made of her: the people who crafted her used Buffy's blood to do it. More importantly: Dawn has been inserted into her memory, she's been inserted into Dawn's memories, and on some level her refusing to sacrifice Dawn is a statement that it's the mere presence of sentiment -- not its reality -- that creates the connections between people. Love, she's saying, doesn't need to be real or "earned" -- it only matters that it exists, and more importantly that we want it to exist.

Hush: which is about communication, of course, but funnily reversed -- the fear it makes concrete, in the form of the scariest demons possibly ever on Buffy stealing everyone's voices, is a fear of not being able to communicate, but in fact the fear afflicting the characters at the moment is a fear of communication. Buffy and her new boyfriend Riley both fight demons and vampires: they're (literally) speechless when they run into one another in this episode and realize this. This is also where Willow meets Tara, who is similarly metaphorically speechless -- shy and stuttering -- and has the same experience with Willow as Buffy has with Riley, only regarding magic. There's also something resonant about the fact that Willow meets her future girlfriend Tara mostly by saving her from "the Gentlemen" who are coming to literally steal her heart! (There are also communication explorations here with regard to Buffy / Giles, Xander / Anya, all of them / Spike, etc.) This is the sort of stuff that seems to be going on in the best of Buffy episodes: plotting that signifies and resonates on a lot of different and very intricate levels, and not just through allegorical plot but through characters specifically negotiating each of these issues. (Also this episode is hilarious.)

I like that someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Nabisco, after nearly 300 posts, can say something about the show and I can say "yes, but on an extra level there is this thing I like about that too". That's real richness.

We should abandon the idea of an ILx argument as a thrilling metaphysical football match which we hope will be resolved in extra time with a decisive Goal of Truth... and replace this with the idea of starting grand open source conversations, the aim of which is to develop lots of Killer Apps - that is, seductive new stories.

There will be other great discussions on ILE. The discussions on how we have discussions on ILE are perhaps not as interesting to me.

(Though note to N*ts*h - in the UK if we are watching Buffy on terrestrial TV there are no ads. How might this change a viewing of Buffy - esp with reference to your first moment you thought Buffy was brilliant).

I think many of us (me, for instance) agree with him, in principle, though we don't always manage to enact that belief in practice.

Something that distinguishes the Nipper's point is that he doesn't just complain - he has a strong sense of a better alternative. And at his best, he can exemplify it.

Now I'm not going to be able to avoid the temptation of watching Buffy as an allegory of ILx :(

Telling choice of term there. ;-) And indeed, mighty fine article, Mr. S. :-)

I should say at this whole point that, as Nabisco and Martin and others have guessed, there's been no sudden motivation to start watching the series on my part; nor do I think that all that I've seen as intrinsic problems with the show in my experience have now been explained or justified per se. Ultimately my core point at the start -- I'm just not interested in serial TV at all as a form anymore -- really is the crux of the matter, I suppose -- it still seems almost too simple and easy for me but I guess it applies -- and attempts to see if Buffy would be my exception to the rule didn't succeed. I'm still not sure if I have a clearer answer than that though I think that maybe I really shouldn't force it beyond that, ultimately -- it will still niggle but that's life. But I do think that this thread has been as varied and nuanced an apologia for the show as anything yet attempted here or elsewhere, the more so because of all the different voices contributing their thoughts, whether in brief or in detail, and sometimes in contradictory but illuminating fashions (the various takes on what the musical episode might been/how it can be seen in particular are fascinating). So I have to thank everybody very much indeed, and apologize for any crabbiness along the way. :-)

If -- a big if -- there's any further thought on my part to add, it might be that for all that I am a lover of fantasy and speculative fiction and so forth, I think that at heart Buffy's construct of slaying-culture-as-life-in-general is less immediately fantastic and strange to me than 'real life' can be. I'm not saying the series would be better served by simply becoming Buffy the Troubled Teen, yet maybe there's something in the complexity of overlapping dreams and visions in the material world that I'd want to see and grasp more. But I'm not sure, and maybe this is an end runaround of the problem. Well, something for me to dwell on -- there was never going to be an instant answer.

"Hi de ho, kiddies -- NYERK!"

In "OMWF," the outcome is honesty, albeit demon inspired; it's also awfully bleak and resigned and broken, triumphing more in desolation than in celebration.

This is fairly obvious, but the fact that the characters don't end up happy and squiffy with bunnies hopping everywhere is a plus. Tis a bit closer to how real life is: sometimes you have to make painful choices. Sometimes, you lose the ones you care for most. Yes, that sucks. Tis how you deal with it that matters.

Hell, I couldn't stand Buffy myself until the last few seasons: too many in-jokes, and not enough meat in the story. However, seeing how she deals with losing her mum and has to learn to be Dawn's surrogate parent is making it watchable again.

My only concern is how many more seasons can B keep going?

Wahey! A spinoff for the new millenium. Why do I have a sudden vision of Buffy's IQ dropping into double digits?

I mean, Buffy's just sitting there going, "What did you do?" with that horrified look on her face and I'm all, "She [spoiler again], don't you have EYES? God, she's so much cooler than you are." Also, the whole "Spike [different spoiler]" thing... EH?????

Does Anya get all demony and bloodthirsty in the finale? I really hope so.

(i logged onto ilx just after a NIGHTMARE WEEK AT WORK and lo! the name "calum" was as a madeleine of nostalgic wubliness...)

gah that other thread is like a swelling nightmare of temptation

*a sentinel clause with no purpose in the sentence, apart from attempting to create a spurious air of authority!

I am not sure about the word 'disdain' as a word for 'dislike' or 'oppose' (which is what I do with many things), as it gives the wrong impression; but perhaps I actually do disdain this programme.

Hm, well, I thought I had (perhaps stumblingly) explained it, but so much of the worship of the show was pitched at a 'it has so much more than anything else around ergo it will appeal to you if you have a brain and how sad for you if you don't get it hmph' level that given my own negative encounters with it I was somewhat nonplussed and wanted to tear through that particular curtain a bit. One reason why I like this thread is that many of the responses avoided that tone for a more considered grappling with its potential, for which I'm grateful though it didn't change my mind (my extremely sharp criticisms in the original post still stand), and as Martin et al also noticed it comes in a format -- an involved years-long serial TV show -- which ultimately I resent these days as an impractical demand on my time. I see more clearly now that if you've fallen out of love or participation with a particular medium or a derivation of same, then all the arguing in the world isn't going to change much in the way of opinion, and I'm not interested in this particular mirror of growth and change over time when reality is more fascinating for me on that front.

I'd agree, but isn't there the fear they sound like an even tweer Cub?

(Mind you, if a black metal band called themselves that, then enlightenment for all might be at hand.)

I found it odd, somehow, to see this headline on the yahoo page.

I tried to start watching season 2 afterwards, but it just seemed boring. The post high-school years are where it's at.

I was thinking about buying the series box set a while back but decided against it. I did buy the first season set though, just to dip into it. I've watched about half a dozen episodes and I can't decide whether or not I actually like it or whether I think it's dire, but the series is slowly drawing me in, so it's probably the former.

I think my favourite part of the series was the start of Series 4, probably because I identified with the university setting more than the original high school premise. Adam was a bit silly, though.

*bows* You must excuse me -- allow for the fact that I *really don't like it* as opposed to the idea I must be missing something, because that will irritate.

season 2 picks up quite a bit after Angel loses his soul - the show was good before then, but after that it got GREAT.

i've been renting every DVD and watching them all in order, and so far season 3 (the only one i've never seen much of) is the best. the first Anya episode (where Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale) is already one of my favorites.

This gets better in season 2, then?

Also, how much of s1 is it useful to watch before trying s2?

it gets better 1/3rd of the way through season 2 and then it just skyrockets into awesomeness.

Buffy = litmus test for iDork.

ned was a brave man for starting this thread

Buffy = litmus test for iDork.

-- libcrypt, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 5:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

TAKES ONE

Because I liked the pilot and ep 2 wasn't bad but I didn't think eps 3 and 4 were great at all. I felt more or less like Ned did. I thought the acting, aside from Buffy, Willow, and Giles, was generally awful (even Xander but esp. e.g. Amy and her Mom), maybe worse than Heroes. I really felt that the metaphors were obvious and heavy-handed (Predatory older woman = praying mantis! Cheerleader Mom = witch who casts spells on rival cheerleaders and steals her daughter's body!) and that the dialogue was a bit hackneyed even by teen-drama standards. I assume there's some sort of ironic/meta/camp thing going on? It did occur to me that I may well be more forgiving if it were from a male perspective (given that I shamelessly enjoy e.g. Chuck). I also suspect that it might just be that I went in with overly high expectations after the way some people hyped it. (I think I was expecting something exceptionally sophisticated.)

I will try a little more, though, since I liked the pilot and I like the idea of the show.

4xpost OK, thanks

it is sophisticated, but in a way that took a little time to come out and which is hard to really appreciate if you arent following the show's long arcs.

some dude told me this story about how he had broken up with this girl who was real important to him. I guess he was raised in a really jesusy snake handling style environment and ran away from it to new york. So after he met this important girl, and after her father gave him a job, and after this girl left him for another woman he had to force himself to think about something. Questioning his flight from his religion was a topic right there to grapple with, so he spent a lot of time delving deeper and deeper and researching all the minutae behind it. At the time he was also an alcoholic and having really furitive and really fucking ugly sex with random women, the best looking of which took him home, asked him if he wanted to watch a tape of buffy that she recorded, and went to the other room. When he told me this story he almost began crying because he was so angry that he ran out when she was in the other room after he heard her say word buffy.

Keep in mind in a lot of ways this show PIONEERED the teen (specif teen girl) snark genre that has brought us Veronica Mars and Popular and Heroes and shaped the sensibilities of a lot of other shows. So if the imitators have refined the technique slightly, they still built on Buffy's foundation.

I just spent two months of my life going through the whole series. I never got into it while it was on (in part because it seemed to be syndicated on about five networks and I couldn't suss out which season was which). Like many people, I felt the "highschool years" were more consistent and had a certain insouciant charm. Much more patchy as it went along, but with a few episodes that stood out (though I don't get the fuss over "Once More With Feeling"). In all, it became too drawn out and arcane at points to really satisfy with any degree of consistency (but I felt compelled to get through it, even the dreaded Riley years).

Admittedly, I came to this after Veronica Mars, which seemed, as you say, to have refined the genre, and only lasted three seasons, thankfully (though I enjoyed VM Season Three much more than Seasons Four-Seven of Buffy).

sundar season one is pretty awful, to be honest i'd skip to season two (which starts off a bit clunky but gets much better) and go back later for completism's sake when you've seen the rest of it, after which the naff aspects of S1 will prob seem endearingly silly.

Season 1 is awful. It's not even close to being good television. I highly recommend skipping it entirely.

aw i recently rewatched season 1. it's okay. but yeah, the first time through it's kind of unimpressive.

I recently rewatched it too... It was even worse than I remember it being. :(

joss whedon stuff is mostly right down there with radiohead and xkcd for me. I think I need my geeky shit to be fuck-you-world geeky and not chummy we're-all-in-this-renfair-together geeky

It's interesting enough if I'm at someone's house and it's being watched.

The actress who plays Buffy is clearly the strongest talent in the show, but unfortunately not much of the rest measures up.

It's like the show wants to *really* attract Sam Raimi fans and Vampire Of The Masquerade fans at the same time, without realizing how the two fan-bases can be exclusive in some ways, and it also tries too hard at that.

But it's not a bad tv show or anything.

Ummm. Kinda feel targeted by that comment.

x-post

I'm kinda surprised this thread wasn't banned at the time.

Ummm. Kinda feel targeted by that comment.

I got picked on in school too! Fuck 'em!

seriously, FUCK 'EM.

I wonder if Joss ever watched much of The Prisoner.

The actress who plays Buffy is clearly the strongest talent in the show

O RLY?

http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/television/buffy/30.jpg

It's one of those shows that just seems incredibly goofy and dumb for a while, since if you catch one episode by itself (or god forbid something like "Once More With Feeling") it's usually going to be unsatisfying -- it's the season-long arc payoffs and long time character and thematic development that make the show great. But there are a handful of episodes that were great enough to standalone that gave me faith in the show to go back and rewatch it all in syndication - particularly episodes like "The Body", but even the awful final season had "Conversations With Dead People".

I can only imagine show stupid Buffy feels to someone who started out with Veronica Mars, since that show builds on Buffy's high school fantasy world/teen super-snark powers and takes it to another level. Probably how kids feel watching The X-Files now.

But yeah, another vote for "don't bother with Season 1 until you're a diehard fan".

It's also the in-jokes -- that freaking show would wait like 4 years to make a joke about something from season 2, and how is that not awesome? Whedon rewards his loyal viewers.

wow that's awesome

hahaha

I can only imagine show stupid Buffy feels to someone who started out with Veronica Mars, since that show builds on Buffy's high school fantasy world/teen super-snark powers and takes it to another level. Probably how kids feel watching The X-Files now.

I've seen this happen -- some friends here at UCI who are current undergrads think Buffy is cheesy and boring. They love Firefly, though.

Every time I've seen a little bit of it the dialog REALLY makes me want to punch the characters. It may be the way the actors are directed, I guess.

The interplay between Buffy, Willow and Xander was great and I can't be mad at the show for raising Seth Green's profile, but by and large I don't care about it at all.

Ech...I hate this larper fanboy crap, and needing to devote that much time just to finally get it is just such a turnoff for me.

^^^tbf, utterly biased horseshit from one of those "I don't own a television" jerkoffs (i.e. me)

So I had tried season 1 awhile back and didn't love it (felt it was enjoyable, but nothing more special than TBS sitcom reruns). Read this thread and decided to give it another try, starting from season 2 this time. I just finished the first disc and it seems a lot like the first season. At what point in season 2 does the quality skyrocket? Cause I'll just skip to that disc.

“Shunnnn, shun the unbeliever….,” that’s what I would have said in 2003, but now I understand where Ned was coming from...

What everyone says is true, season 1 is not all that. The show was still floundering around between b-movie cheese, chop-socky violence, and big issue profundity. It wasn't until later in season 2, that the show found some balance. It only maintained the window of goodness for a very short time though. By season 4 the show was already starting to slip. Once the main characters had left high school, the writers didn't seem to know what to do with them. There certainly were isolated episodes of goodness, but overall quality never again reached the sustained levels of season 2 and 3.

Towards the second half, Mordy. I usually just watch the "arc" episodes of season 2 and skip the "monster of the week" ones.

I actually quite like the later seasons in comparison to even 2 and 3. Actually, I think 3 is pretty terrible. I can't think of a single "great" episode. But there are quite a few in seasons 4-6 especially. 7 is much more uneven, but still has glimmers of goodness.

watch disc 3 of season 2.

firefly never came close to this show at its best.

Well, I haven't seen enough Buffy to compare honestly to Firefly, but "Objects in Space" and "The Message" were both amazing episodes.

there are a lot of weak episodes scattered through the series (definitely including a lot of season 1), but for me they're more than compensated for by: a double-handful or so of actually great episodes; the nice balance between comedy, drama and horror, which is harder to maintain than it looks; and the ongoing, evolving relationships between the characters.

I think I need my geeky shit to be fuck-you-world geeky and not chummy we're-all-in-this-renfair-together geeky

yeah buffy is pretty fluffy-bunny in its goodness-can-save-the-world insistence. i guess i'm ok with some fluffy-bunny in my life.

ya but it's also pretty dark in a way that can be surprising... it doesnt ignore the resentments and character flaws and other shit that build up. i really like how there's basically no status quo on the show.

Mordy, have you watched "Lie to Me"? It's probably the best episode they'd done up to that point, and I think it's where the show gets a bit more adult in tone. It's still quite funny, though - lots of cheap jokes at Angel's expense.

I watched the puppet one from the first season last week. Best ending/credits ever.

I haven't gotten up to "Lie to Me" yet. I assume that'll be on the third disc. I'll report back after having seen it.

Lucky me, the whole second season appears to be on Hulu. So I'm skipping "Reptile Boy" and "Halloween" and going straight to "Lie to Me." Then, unless there's advice here to the contrary, I'll just watch straight from "Lie to Me" till the end of the season ("Becoming - Part I + II).

Serious question from someone who's only seen four episodes:

In "Once More With Feeling," Xander and Anya sing a number in which they reveal misgivings about their relationship. But as far as I could tell, nowhere in the rest of the episode do they acknowledge said misgivings. And as a Buffy loyalist explained to me yesterday, they do not acknowledge any misgivings until one leaves the other (I can't remember which) at the altar later in the series.

So assuming I'm correct and that they don't, in fact, acknowledge any misgivings throughout the episode, then Whedon was using the musical number as a way to say what the rest of the narrative cannot (or does not), correct? Basically, Xander and Anya reveal their misgivings ONLY in the musical number and nowhere else. Is that correct?

I know this sounds ridiculously minor but, well, there ya have it.

I'll thank whoever answers in my own acknowledgments.

if i recall correctly, and i havent seen it in a while, the idea was that their feelings were so submerged, maybe even to themselves, they only came out accidentally in song.

OK that's what I figured. Thanx man!!!

Yeah, KGB, the whole point with all the characters in the musical is that they find themselves singing various misgivings and doubts that haven't really been acknowledged: Giles feeling like he has nothing left to do for Buffy, Tara being eclipsed by Willow's power, Xander and Anya's cold feet, etc. Hence the big payoff being when Buffy accidentally sings what she's been trying not to tell anyone: that when they resurrected her they actually pulled her out of heaven, where she was happy.

I'm kinda sick of Buffy because my wife watches the whole series a couple of times a year, but "The Body" (the episode where Buffy's mother dies) is really good.

I didn't watch Buffy until after it was all on DVD, but I really liked every season. I do think that things improved in that third season (although my memory is not totally clear on that).

A lot of people don't care for parts of the later seasons (especially the "Dawn" stuff) - but there was a lot I did enjoy. There's an episode where Buffy is invisible in Season 6 that is one of my favorites. Also, anything with Anya saying the totally tactless stuff that she says cracks me up.

Honestly, my favorite characters wound up being Spike and Anya by the end of it.

All of that being said, if you don't like the show or aren't attracted to the humor or whatever, there are lots of other good things out there to watch. Life's too short to spend watching hours of television that you don't even enjoy!

I am kinda not as huge on teen-drama Season Three as many people -- I'd probably say Four and Five together are the very best part of the show. The series "ending" in Five would have made such a perfect close.

^ OTM, though I do like a lot of seasons 6 & 7.

do we disdain the angel spinoff? i thought it had some good moments

Season 1 (to me) ls like the Guided by Voices boxset: I realize others will deem it a turd but I can't help liking it. I love the show in its entirety,flaws et al.

Angel was okay but in all honesty I'd never recommend it to someone who hasn't seen Buffy. It's for completists. I gave up after S3 I think. Can't even remember. It wasn't that bad, just, well, not that relevant. Or something.

I think the only good season of Angel was its last season, where it had a continuous run of some really great episodes. The show as a whole had some good episodes here and there, but it was maddeningly uneven and at times downright terrible.

I've only seen the first season of Angel. It was... okay. The one episode that stuck with me was the one where Buffy came to visit Angel and Angel gets to not be a vampire and then it all falls apart and he fixes it so that she can't remember. For whatever reason, the emotion of all that really got to me.

I'll probably watch the rest of the seasons eventually, but it's not at the top of my must-watch list.

Angel was spotty at best. Check out the episodes Hero, Five By Five, Disharmony, and Smile Time. The last season of Angel was better than the last season of Buffy.

Five by Five must have Faith in it?

angel ended up a much better show than buffy. seasons 3 and 5 are pound for pound more enjoyable than the best buffy runs. also, no dawn.

Ok, after the first two-parter in season 2, I figured out what Season 2 has that makes it far superior to Season 1: Spike and Druscilla. They make much more fun and better villains than that little kid. Makes all the difference.

Fourth season of Angel was the best. Had some crap parts (for once, the characters that turned evil became way less entertaining) but it was a hell of a lot of fun to watch as it was happening, since they made it into a really fast-paced serial, and every episode ended with the situation being radically different from where it was at the start.

The last third or so of season 3 was really good too. Basically, after Wesley talked to a giant hamburger, the show improved markedly.

i really want to "do" angel but there's so many eps, i'm not sure i want to watch all 22 of season 1 and 2 to get season3, nahmean?

is there a bluffer's guide? selected must-see episodes?

You could do what I do. Watch it on TNT at 6:00 AM. :P

ya but it's also pretty dark in a way that can be surprising

definitely. the angel-buffy stuff had real dramatic heft. and the episode where [SPOILER, I GUESS, IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT] her mom died was pretty wrenching. and some of the dark-willow bits were pretty grim.

xpost Mordy OTM about Spike and Drusilla. (Also I like to listen to the stuff Drusilla says because it's so over-the-top crazy. And because that actress looks someone I know).

She's Martin Landau's daughter.

Actually I guess she favors Barbara Bain more.

Tara being eclipsed by Willow's power

See that's what had me so confused. Xander and Anya reveal lots in their song but their relationship doesn't change whereas Tara and Willow reveal nothing in their song (as far as I could tell, it was just an expression of love) but their relationship does change in this episode. Maybe I misheard the Tara/Willow song?

Re: Tara and Willow (SPOILERS!!!!): It's more in the episode itself than in the song. Willow has been using magic on Tara to make her forget things and Tara wasn't aware of it. Tara had a bad experience with her mind being messed with by a demon in a previous episode, so this is even worse than it would be (how would you feel if your lover was messing with your mind?).

This all kicks off the whole Willow is addicted to magic arc, which then leads to Evil Willow stuff (if I'm remembering right).

slocki and nabisco otm, though i love season 3. season 5 is really great, and pretending critical distance, i can see how it would have been a great end to the series. also i have no critical distance from this show and am basically a 15 year old girl about it.

Angel had one of the best series finales ever.

buffy had one of the most letting-downing!

There was some touching stuff, though - Anya ;_;

It's more in the episode itself than in the song.

Exactly. Which means the songs don't all work the same way. Very disorienting for a newbie like me.

Anyhoo, thanx Sara R-C!

You're welcome! It makes more sense in the context of watching the series than in watching Once More, With Feeling alone.

That being said, I think the musical episode can stand on its own to some extent. I let my kids watch it (yes, I know; TERRIBLE MOMMYING), and they love it. Thankfully they miss some of the more risque implications of some of it... so far.

Xander and Anya definitely do hear each other's complaints from the song, though - when they're describing what happened to Giles they reference each other's lyrics.

So I'm skipping "Reptile Boy" and "Halloween" and going straight to "Lie to Me."

I think "Halloween" is one of the best episodes of the entire series, I would definitely not miss that one.

is there a bluffer's guide? selected must-see episodes?

Season 2 and the last bit of Season 4 are good, skip everything else.

Xander and Anya hear the complaints/fears, but they don't ever address them. I always interpreted this as fear, but it was one of many things that suggested that their relationship had serious problems.

Don't miss "Halloween!"

Season 2 and the last bit of Season 4 are good, skip everything else.

No one can agree on what the best ones are...

Just to be clear, I was talking about the good parts of Angel there.

I didn't mind Dawn so much. Now Conner on Angel, he was frigging insufferable, but maybe that was the point. I agree the last episode of Angel was among the best.

i thought the dawn plotline was kinda brilliant

esp the way she was introduced.

yeah that was handled well. and michelle trachtenberg was pretty lovable. (i don't watch gossip girl, so i don't know if she's good in anything else.)

not so great on Six Feet Under, but they didn't give that character much humanity

multi-xp - The second season of Angel is just waiting for me, so now I'm kind of excited to watch it. THX!

xxxp Michelle was great in Gossip Girl. She did brilliant stuff with being a total sociopath. But then again, I've had a soft spot for her ever since the Adventures of Pete and Pete.