Sage Rat, I’m completely on board with your core point. We absolutely should compare works to things that have come before regardless of whether they’re precisely the same genre or medium. No disagreement from me.
But you kinda sidestepped my actual question. What are the points of comparison you would draw between Buffy and those other works? Plot structure, dialogue, acting setting, themes, etc. You’ve said you don’t think Buffy measures up, could you please explain more precisely where it falls short compared to those other works?
It’s hard to say, since it’s been several years since I watched it and since it didn’t leave much of an impression in my mind.
The cinematography and production values were pretty distinctly Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (MMPR) level quality, so certainly from a technical standpoint there’s nothing to write home about. But I don’t really want to ding it on that basis since the budget for TV and expectations, when it was made, were pretty low. But, at the same time, if you watch something like the old Twilight Zone, they were under similar constraints, but were able to put gravitas into it through the quality of writing and acting. Or, alternately, if you watch the new Dr Who (I haven’t seen the old), they were able to deal with the poor budget when they started out (their budget seems to have improved as the series has become more popular) by keeping everything a bit cheesy and hokey and not taking themselves too seriously. Or, when doing a serious/scary episode, by making sure that it is strongly written and that the special effects are kept to a minimum and not relied on overly.
I don’t feel like Buffy ever achieved either of those two solutions. The monster of the week generally had about the level of screen presence as a MMPR guy in a rubber suit, but they didn’t try and add any stylistic camp to deal with it nor tongue-in-cheek nod to the budgetary restraints. But there was also never any good writing/acting that made you forget that and look past this issue.
A show like Kamen Rider Ryuki still has the MMPR-style guy in a rubber suit, but the producers know that it’s cheesy and they ham up the direction to compensate.
Now I’ll grant that Kamen Rider probably has worse acting than Buffy, on the whole. But for a camp show, acting isn’t really a top priority. They’re supposed to be hamming it up. But as said, if you don’t go for camp and your special effects aren’t very good, then you really either need some damn good acting or writing.
The acting in Buffy is pretty sub-par. For the main character, they made sure to cast someone decent. But for the rest, they focused on the look they were going for and stopped when they had satisfied that. And personally, I think that works against it. With just one good actor, it shows how poor everyone else is and kills your chance for camp you’re almost better off to just have poor actors. Or, alternately, you need at a least a few good actors among your roster so that, like Star Trek TNG (Picard, Data, sometimes Geordi, sometimes Worf), you’ve got at least one person in each subplot who can carry it. With just the one actor able to put some oomph into their character, you end up with a lot of downtime of material that you just don’t give much of a crap about.
Now as to the writing…
As I recall it, the show had a pretty strong case of Leveragitis. That is to say, like the show Leverage, they let the characters become so overpowered that pretty quickly there’s no real threat imposed by the Monster of the Week. Monsters are slain as an afterthought.
I believe that I recall - though I haven’t seen it since like 1993 - that this was also true by the end of the Buffy film. She could kill any vampire without scarcely bothering to try. But it was funny. They played up that fact as a joke. In the TV show, maybe they did a bit, but it just didn’t play right. It was a sort of wishy-washy, “Yeah I can just defeat any bad guy, at a whim, but only if it’s the fourth act.”
Every Buffy episode is horribly formulaic. Now, I’m aware that there’s a musical episode and so on. I’ve only seen the first three seasons, so perhaps it lost the formula at some point, but so far as my memory is concerned, I believe that the general formula was:
There’s a new bad guy.
They fight with the bad guy and lose.
They do some research and planning. Find the MacGuffin. Whatever.
They fight the bad guy again and win, handily.
Now personally, I’m not a fan of formulas. I let House MD get away with it because the writing and acting is so good and since the formulaic bits are the B plot not the A plot. Buffy doesn’t have that.
On average, as I recall, the A plot is the monster plot. There’s also an overarching season plot, which is effectively an extended version of the above formula. So in each episode, you have the formula A plot, the formula season-length C plot, and a little bit of teen angst and comedy as the B plot.
Reaper pretty quickly tosses the monster of the week formula, turns the friendship and relationships into the main story and the brunt of their long-term plots (which, I don’t think even start or end with season end). When the writers have an idea for a fun monster, they bring it in and come up with some good humor around how to beat it. But that’s a second to the lives of the characters and their interaction with Satan. The relationship between the three friends is palpable, like the Top Gear guys or the main cast of Warehouse 13. The Buffy actors just seem like a bunch of poor actors playing out overly dramatic tween fiction characters.
In the Buffy spinoff, Angel, the acting and production is still crap, but they tossed a lot of the formula and started to do a better job of focusing on the characters and what they’re doing together. Unfortunately, Hulu only had the first season available when I watched it. I don’t know how long it was able to keep that up, but at least S1 of Angel seemed like a better show to me than Buffy.
Or alternately, one could do something like Kamen Rider, where you keep ramping up the terror of the secret world that the main characters are dealing with, raising the stakes on what they’re dealing with; throw in a few curveballs, kill some big characters, add some unexpected depth into it all. Go for some proper world building and slowly reveal it to the viewer, so there’s something there to soak in as time progresses.
If all that happens is that characters periodically turn “evil” (e.g., acting snooty to the main characters and killing the occasional unimportant character) or “good”, because you want to vary between “sexy” and “evil sexy”, I just don’t care. That is not the makings of a compelling story. Yeah there was an episode of DS9 where Kira gets to be evil sexy, and I appreciated it quite well, but that’s not the principal season-long arc. It’s a one-off story. Minor relationship dynamic changes, which we know will be restored to the status quo, are not compelling.
Now as said, there may not have been a lot of competition at the time. As compared to MMRP, I’m sure that Buffy is a thing of amazement. But I just didn’t watch TV in the 90s, because it wasn’t worth trying to track down anything good due to the sheer quantity of crap. I watched film, read books, and watched anime. TV, in the US, just wasn’t a medium that had much of value to offer.
And one could probably thank Buffy for shows like Reaper, Lost Girl, Agents of SHIELD, etc. But one could also thank the Ramones for punk rock. They’re still not very good. All you can really thank Whedon for is his willingness to take a genre like MMRP and try to make something more adult out of it. But, frankly, the Japanese had already been doing that for a decade. MMRP, like Robotech, didn’t make it into the US because it was good or renowned in its home country. Someone just figured it was cheaper to buy a crappy show from Japan than to produce something new. But there was almost certainly better stuff available within Japan. For example, Kamen Rider Black is rumored to be better than Ryuki and was produced in 1987. Devilman, the manga, came out in 1972.
Whedon has gotten better with time (particularly as he has started to let others handle the cinematography and has been forced to hire A-list actors), but I would really recommend other shows than Buffy, Firefly, or Dollhouse if I knew someone was looking for something along those lines. Particularly in the case of Buffy, where there’s English language descendants like Reaper, Lost Girl, Agents of SHIELD, etc. there’s simply no reason to watch Buffy anymore, unless you’re of that era and enjoy the nostalgia.
Special effects were certainly never the STRONG point, but they got better, and were used better, as the show progressed. Look at The Gentlemen, from Hush
I just disagree. I actually think Sarah Michelle Gellar may be the weakest actor of the main ensemble. Alyson Hannigan and Anthony Stewart Head are particularly good. There are occasional minor characters who are wooden, but that’s the exception, not the rule, and (as with most things Buffy) it improves over the course of the show.
Buffy grew in power somewhat over the course of the show, but not to a ridiculous extent. Willow, of course, went from being a nerdy sidekick to a powerful magic user in her own right. But I thought the show did a fine job of continuing to present challenges to the characters that were, well, challenging. And of course as has often been pointed out, the show is rarely really about Buffy vs some monster, it’s about Buffy vs growing up, Buffy vs college, Buffy vs her mother dying of natural causes, etc.
You could not be more wrong. You could try, but you would not succeed. What you are describing is season 1 of Buffy, which is universally derided. Not every episode has a monster of the week, some are part of larger arcs. And, most importantly, many episodes that do have a monster of the week aren’t really about that monster, as mentioned above. If all you see is a monster showing up and then being defeated, then again, then again, well… you weren’t paying attention at all.
It’s a pity **Sage Rat **can’t put all that passion about his favorites into starting a new thread.
In this thread, all that condescension is just making me dislike other shows–most of which I haven’t seen. I heard* Agents of SHIELD* got better, but I can’t just make myself sit through those first episodes again…
I like *Buffy *a lot & still come back to some episodes. Once someone’s seen the whole run of the show, they’ll know what they prefer. There’s a lot of other stuff I like but most is not relevant here. Except for Angel.…
Season 1 gets a bad rap but I like it. Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest, Witches, Puppet Show, Nightmares and Prophecy Girl are all good episodes. That’s 5 out of 13 episodes.
Almost done with Season 2 and its going very well. Much improved from season 1, as was to be expected from all your guys comments. Not so formulaic, which is a big plus.
Recent developments …
Oz showing up more in the episodes and also finding out he is a werewolf.
Giles and Jenny Calendar’s relationship on the rocks after she reveals her gypsy curse changing Angel back to Angelus. Later episodes in season 2 make their relationship a major strain because Angelus kills Jenny.
Overall, very pleased with developments… well, except for Ms. Calendar dying. That kind of sucked.
About halfway done with Season 3 now. The gang just found out that Buffy has been keeping Angel’s return a secret. Giles especially gave her a major guilt trip for it, as he should have, considering Angelus had tortured him for fun.
Ok, I now have another favorite episode to go along with Hush, well, so far anyway.
Spike just returned to Sunnydale and takes Willow hostage to make a love potion to win back Drusilla. Dammit, Spike was just awesome in this episode! Whining to Buffy’s mom and to Willow about how Dru left him. That whole scene where he’s in the kitchen with mom, and Angel sees them and tries to get in to help but can’t. Great stuff, man. Great stuff indeed.
I’ve officially finished all of Buffy and Angel, watching them in order for all the correct episode crossovers. I was very pleased with the ending for Buffy, that epic battle in the Hellmouth was awesome and it was nice to see Spike go out with a bang, so to speak. He has definately turned into my new favorite character on the show.
I loved that he then went over to Angel and helped out his crew for the remainder of the show. The finale of Angel was well done, even if it was open ended, it made sense though, since evil can never go away, the idea of there always being someone there to fight it was well demonstrated.
Yeah, I loved Angel the show, but I could never really get into the character of Angel himself. He was cool, but he didn’t really stand out to me until the times he was Angelus. Then he would shine more.
Skip the Demon was awesome as well. Gunn had some good times as well.
The whole story line with teenage Conner wasn’t really all that interesting to me, but Conner himself became more appealing after he had his memory changed to live with his new family. Then he was more fun.
Lorne was also a great character, but I think I also have a soft spot for both him and Doyle from season one, because both of their actors - Glenn Quinn and Andy Hallet died so young.
