Thoughts on Buffy (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

No, this is a fault of your perception. She comes into the series having already left the bubbleheaded cheerleader behind. That is dealt with in the Buffy movie, which the series is more-or-less afollow-up to.

That was not about her evolving, but more about a momentary relapse on her part, coupled with competition with Cordelia.

Wait, you thought she was taking Cordelia seriously? She could already see through her from the get-go, at least, it seemed like that to me.

Right, no adult has ever fallen in love with someone they shouldn’t have, or failed to consider the consequences of their romantic actions…plus, they don’t know about that particular effect of the curse before the fact, that much is clear.

This I agree with - but then Hannigan was always my least favourite of the cast.

You make it sound like the were shooting for witty and failed. I think they very intentionally showed how sometimes, someone can be an asshole and cover it up wiith an attempt at humour. As we find out later, Xander has some issues.

Well, guns in the hands of slayers will be pretty useless given the vampiric immunity to them. But there is a gun-using vamp, later on.

I disagree. I like the flavour he brings to his product - not over-slick, but not too cheesy. Kind of like Doctor Who in some respects.

22

I hope I won’t arise the ire of the resident Whedon fans (I like a lot of the stuff he’s done, too!), nor derail the thread too much, but really, what is it with him and innocent and helpless seeming young girls that could actually kick your ass six way to Sunday (or are superior in some other way)? More often than not, they’re also ‘damaged goods’ in some way… I mean, we’ve got Buffy, air-headed cheerleader prettygirl turned vampire killer, Willow, nerdy computer girl turned ultra-powerful sorceress, River Tam, who can kill you with her brain and possesses a somewhat, uh, altered perception of reality, basically all the girls in Dollhouse who’re more or less empty vessels loaded up with whatever badass programming is needed, and wasn’t there some girl on Angel, too, who’d spent a lot of time in some other dimension, got a little weird, but was actually some sort of super-scientist?

23

A couple of observations:

  • Whedon is a self-described “feminist”
  • TV Shows designed to have ongoing, long-running plots have to have damaged characters on a journey of sorts. Redeeming a wrong, growing up, etc. A pro-woman narrative where a female character must overcome damage AND the burden of a woman’s stereotyped weakness, etc. fits this.
  • the trope of having the week, meek blond wander into an alley, have a monster walk in after her, and she kicks its ass - it’s fun and turns things on their head.
  • cute girls are hawt;). Networks like shows with hawt girls, I hear.

weave all that together and, well, there ya go: instant Whedon.

I guess what I struggle with regarding the OP is that yes, by definition there are only a few plots in the world - so the fact that Buffy embraces the same structure as Scooby-Doo, Power Rangers, etc. - it really isn’t the point. It’s what the standard plots and characters are used to explore. Star Wars is no different than To Kill a Mockingbird, which is no different than The Sufferings of Young Werther by Goethe (considered the seminal work of German literature, I believe) - they are all coming-of-age stories. So? Each uses the same construct to go VERY different places.

I happen to like the places that Buffy/Whedon wanted to go and how it used it’s “standard” plot to explore those places. Everything else in your argument is sophistry - driven by the fact that, for whatever reason, you don’t seem to engage with the sub-text Whedon wove into the show, as laid out by **CyclopticXander **(who apparently embraced Buffy all the way through Season 7 when Xander lost an eye…). Please note - there is nothing wrong with that - YMMV and all - but if you don’t dig what a show is trying to do, it becomes stupendously easy to pick it apart from the outside in…

Gotta run.

24

I am pretty much with the OP. I know everyone says it gets good in the second season but I couldn’t even make it through the first season. It felt very shallow and way too light-hearted and gaping plot holes all over the place that I about fell through, and Buffy was most definitely a Cordelia, just a little nicer.

I didn’t hate it. I was just utterly bored by it.

And FTR, I did watch Firefly and liked it a lot, so it’s not just picking on “Whedonites”.

25

Oddly enough, I’ve been rewatching our Buffy DVD’s over the past few weeks, partly to see if the show was as good as I remember it being.

It is… and it isn’t.

Season 1 is OK. They’re trying to get the show established, introduce the characters, give them personalities. A lot of good one liners (mostly from Cordelia - “Oh, Willow, so you’ve seen the softer side of Sears.” “I must call everybody I’ve ever known right now!”) But it isn’t close to being the best that Buffy was capable of being.

Season 2 and 3 are better. Some really strong episodes, Oz is introduced, the characters are stronger. Some idiocies are resolved (really, did they have to keep Buffy’s mom as clueless as to Buffy’s activities as long as they did? That was very unbelievable - I guess Joyce just slept like the dead and didn’t bother to check to see if her wayward daughter was sneaking out at night), but the big weakness of the two seasons is Angel and his entire arc. Boreanez just sucked energy from the screen whenever he appeared as Angel, and his Angelus, while better, wasn’t really believable as the end-all, be-all of EVIL. The Mayor was my favorite big bad back when the show was running, but now he seems rather forced.

Season 4 is where it starts being truly strong. A lot of great episodes, everybody is in the full swing of their characters, Anya becomes a regular (she’s probably my favorite character), a lot of Oz, the kids are out of high school. Adam was probably the weakest of the big bads, an opinion that I held back when the show was running, and still hold. S4 had a lot of Harmony as well, who was always good for comic relief:

“So, Slayer, at last we meet.”
“We’ve met, Harmony, you half-wit.”

Season 5 is probably (so far) my favorite. Glory was a lot of fun, and on the re-watch, Dawn wasn’t as irritating as she was in the first go around - I found myself sympathizing with the poor girl quite a bit. She’s had a sucky life - born as a 15 year-old, within weeks finds out she’s not human, a few weeks after that she loses her mother, then a few weeks after that she loses her sister. What a suck-ass year that would be for anybody! Glory’s minions were great.

I’ve just started season 6 which was(is) my favorite season so far. Didn’t care for S7 on the first viewing, but if this thread is still going in a week or three I’ll throw in my opinion.

Anyway, to conclude this meandering post, imho you cannot “get” Buffy by watching the first season and half of season 2. It takes some time for the more mature themes to evolve, but I will admit that telling somebody “You need to watch the first 30-odd hours before it gets really good” might not go over too well. :wink:

26

Actually, the above Harmony quote was from season 5. My bad.

27

Agreed. Especially for a TV series, if it doesn’t hit the ground running it’s hard to convince people to take a real interest in it, even if there’s a gigantic payoff later on. If the good plots need to establish the characters first, you can’t watch the later stuff without first seeing the early stuff. It’s the same with Babylon 5; the first season is horribly cheesy and almost painful to sit through, but there are plot elements introduced that set up the spectacular second through fourth seasons that can’t be missed.

I enjoyed the hell out of Buffy, but I will admit that my enthusiasm disappeared midway through Season 3. I liked the show and didn’t have anything against it, but I stopped bothering to watch. It’s a bit of a shame, since I understand things get really interesting later on.

Equating Buffy to Power Rangers is…really, really missing the point. Sentai shows are all about the awesomeness of the various gadgets and abilities being used to kill the monster of the week and little more. The plot is just an excuse to fight giant monsters. In Buffy, the premise of fighting vampires and demons is just a framework to weave a plot around. You don’t watch the show to see Buffy kick some ass (necessarily), you watch it for the characters and their interactions with each other. People go around quoting Buffy and not Power Rangers because Buffy’s strength is in the writing, not the action.

28

*Buffy *is done in long-form, a multi-season series with internal consistency, canon, and a rich tableau of characters. You should go into it with that in mind. Some people will prefer shorter formats.

Other examples of long-form include Star Trek, Babylon 5, Angel, Stargate, Doctor Who, Lost, Friends, Seinfeld, or even How I Met Your Mother. The beauty of long-form is that it allows you to get so familiar with the personalities that you can savor the little subtleties particular to a character without the actor needing to club you over the head with a heavy-handed performance. After a while, you get that Monica Geller is a neat freak or that Spock has a lot of emotions but tries not to show it. Then, you start to care about why these characters got that way. In long-form, they eventually have time to delve into backgrounds and by that time, the audience actually cares.

The problem with the format, is the first episodes are invariably weaker because actors need to settle into their roles and the writing has not gotten into a rhythm yet. As a member of the audience, you take a risk… do you stick with the hope that the series will develop into something great, or is this going to be more of the same?

If the theme is unappealing and none of the characters have hooked you by season three, I would say this series probably isn’t for you. But what, if any, long-form series have you enjoyed? Was it as great in the beginning? If not, what caused you to stick around until the problems got fixed?

29

Most dramatic series today are long form.

But what makes Buffy a great TV show is the storytelling and dialog. Whedon was very good at putting in twists and surprises that not only confounded our expectations, but were on reflection were much more logical that our expectations were.

I saw this in the first episode I watched (I can in late). Willow was being asked to become a minion of an evil demon. She refuses. Now, this is a common situation in literature, and the expectation is that the evil character will try to force her to join him. Instead, he just sighs and say, “Well, you have my token. If you change your mind, give me a summons.” Much more logical than what’s usually shown. I knew that the show was written by a master.

Throughout the series – yes, even in the first season – the stories and plots took familiar situations and then went into new ground with them. And, of course, the dialog was among the best to be written for a TV series.

It seems like the OP is looking at the superficialities (Buffy, for instance, was never a children’s or teen series; it always dealt with dark issues – but subtly). The show is great because of great storytelling, great characters, and clever plotting.

30

I have to say, I’m a long-time Whedonite, and I agree with the OP.

Part of the charm of the Buffy/Angel-verse to me is that the show seems to mature along with the characters. The first three seasons of Buffyare fairly one-dimensional. They are very monster of the week. The characters are very one-note. The show cruises by on some of the wittiest dialog, most enjoyable action, and most entertaining (if sometimes shallow) characters on TV.

I’ve actually been re-watching Buffy from the beginning over the last month or two, and I just finished up season 4. I think it’s somewhere in the middle of that first college year that the characters and the show start to grow up together. I think this is the point where the show literally becomes about maturing, and the show itself grows up a lot.
Giles Starts to suffer from depression as he is no longer needed even as a librarian, let alone a watcher
Willow loses Oz and pines away for him, only realizing that she is in love with Tara when Oz finally comes back.
Xander is the classic “left behind” friend, who doesn’t go to college with his friends. He questions his place in the group.

The funny thing is that if anything ruins Buffy in the later years, or at least takes some of the fun out of the show, it’s that it grows too mature, to the point of becoming depressing. There are some of the best but most gut-wrenching episodes of any TV show to be found in there:

Joyce dies. Tara is shot. Spike tries to rape Buffy. Xander goes to be with Willow as she ends the world because he loves her.

As well as some of the most fun. Once More With Feeling is probably THE fan favorite, as well as Hush, which the OP just barely missed by stopping with S3.

Wow, this is getting long. One more thought for the OP; I always liked Buffy: TVS but LOVE Angel. While Buffy is largely about the experience of high school and college and all the teen angst that goes along with that, Angel is about leaving childhood behind and making a life as an adult. It is a much more mature show. If you get past season 1, which is also largely Monster-of-the-Week, it really does get exponentially better from there. The last season is, IMHO, the creme de la creme of any work with Joss’s name on it.

31

Well, duh? If people basically tell you, “yeah, season 1 isn’t the greatest, but it really improves in season 2 and then just gets wayyy better after that”, but you only watch half of the first season, no crap you wouldn’t like it much.

32

I didn’t find season 1 to be all that shallow. Of course, the person I watched it with insisted on showing me the horribly 80s-early 90s movie first. Talk about camp, my god. Low-budget, goofy, poorly acted…

When I started watching season 1, I wept grateful tears that SMG actually had personality and the characters were interesting and it was funny and…

33

Buffy has the major, perennial problem of all high school TV shows that are supposed to be set in a continuing chronology - it all falls apart when you go to college. People don’t feel the same way about college as they do about high school - college is where we all grew up and got our shit together. So every TV show that goes to college goes off the tracks - it just doesn’t work there the same way it does in high school.

Then, it makes the ENORMOUS mistake of downgrading and essentially getting rid of all the damned grownups, and the “long running show” problem of the Incredible Shrinking Cast - where did the side characters go? Because the main cast cannot carry the whole thing. See also: Scrubs.

I mean, I love it, don’t get me wrong. We’re halfway through Season 7 right now and I don’t get why people hate it - 6 was way, waaaaay worse and suffered most extremely from all of those problems. It took us most of a year to watch 6 because we just completely lost interest, but we own the whole thing so we felt a duty. Frankly I don’t even want to go back and watch early episodes because it will remind me of all the great things about it and hurt my little heart.

34

Everyone says season 1 of Buffy is no good, but I don’t see it. I likes seasons 2, 3, and 5 better, but it is still a reasonably entertaining season of TV.

I think part of the problem with Buffy is that evangelists sell it as if it is the greatest thing ever to grace the TV, and act like it should be taken uber-seriously. I love Buffy and try to get people to watch it, but you can’t force people to care about the characters immediately. It is light-hearted, even comedic (especially in the high school seasons), and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. The show also does dramatic life-changing events rather well, but it takes time to get there and builds up a reserve of sympathy for (some of) the characters so that it matter to the audience what happens.

The dialogue is a huge part of the importance of a TV show to me. Less so the film quality (which for seasons 1 and 2 of Buffy is very poor due to extreme budget constraints; I’d love to see a remastered DVD of those seasons). Buffy succeeds at the things I care most about and its failures are not major, for me. When I get people to watch the show, I try to explain what to expect so that there is not the problem of outrageously OTT expectations.

35

I think a “winnowing question” is, did you like the episode with the eggs? If you didn’t, you take it way, way too seriously. If you did, then you probably see the problems in the later seasons that I did. It bugs me that Joss evidently thinks people didn’t like them because they were “too dark”. That’s stupid - dark is fine, stupid is not. Addicted to magic? Yeah. Unbalanced because there’s nobody left but the Scoobies? Exactly.

ETA - I might not have been exact enough - the first or second season episode with the “keep your egg safe” school assignment. The one that was adorable and funny and it’s okay that it was totally stupid. That one.

36

Bad Eggs

The Gorch brothers were cool.

37

The problem is that Buffy works best as the whole 7 seasons. There’s stuff that’s referenced in season 2 or 3 that plays out in season 5, or even later in Angel. It’s not perfect, but it works much better in the long form. There are certainly some plotholes that don’t get resolved (could someone explain to me what Joyce meant in s7?) but that’s going to happen in seven seasons.

This is explained, beautifully, in Season 5.

Hear it from the man himself. It gets good around the 2:45 mark.

38

Saying Joss shouldn’t direct his own shows is way, way wrong. It is widely agreed that many of the best episodes of Buffy are those few that Joss directed himself (such as Season 3’s Doppelgängland, Season 4’s Hush, or Season 6’s Once More With Feeling.)

One other thing people miss: Joss really was trying to do something new with Buffy. He created a show that blends equal parts coming-of-age comedy, honest emotional drama, and campy horror. There are shows that did two of the three, but in my opinion there had never been successful shows with all three.

Anyway it’s the “campy” part that throws some people, but I think it what helps gives the show its resonance. The campy element is what keeps the emotional teenage-angst metaphorical element from becoming too heavy-handed (compare with Beverly Hills 90210). Some of the metaphors are a bit obvious, some of the camp is a bit too campy, and the balance isn’t always perfect, but when it was, Buffy was the best show on Television.

As for Joss’s fondness for girls kicking ass, I point out that he more or less pursued the trope for the first time with a seriousness that had never been seen before, and also … check out this video.

Edit: Pigs in Space beat me to the link. I’m leaving it in.

39

Do you mean the whole “In the end Buffy won’t be there for you” bit? The first was trying its best to manufacture distrust between the good guys via emotional manipulation…divide and conquer and all that.

40

[guy mode]

I will say that Buffy had, imho, the best looking female cast ever on TV.

[/guy mode]