What do you love about Buffy?

Cafe Society
1

My friend convinced me to watch this show, and together we just finished season three. I thought the show was just above-average until midway through season three, where I think it turned into a fantastic television show. However, I am having trouble articulating to myself why I like it so much. Most of the shows that I really like are the more recent HBO or AMC dramas, with short seasons and very serious themes, no stand-alone episodes (every episode contributes to the overall plotlines of the season) and very artsy cinematography, backgrounds/sets and costuming: shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones.

Buffy, on the other hand, really has none of these things. The show looks kind of cheaply made (which, in all fairness, considering it was airing on the WB it may have been) and the special effects, costuming and fight scenes are all cheesy. The actual ambiance reminds me more of a sitcom (particularly something like Community) where over-animated characters engage in excited dialogue on a very few, very artificial-looking sets (Don Draper’s office, for example, somehow seems more “real” to me than the library they always gather in. Sometimes sets like the library or the lawn in front of the school almost look green-screened, even though I know they’re not). In addition, the plotting can be inconsistent–for instance, during season three:

At some point are introduced some Books of Ascension which are evidently super-important for the mayor’s ascension. Everyone wants them and Willow even tears some pages out of one. But they don’t really come up again . . . we never know why they are important. And in the season finale, did we ever find out why the mayor had that geologist murdered?

So I’m trying to figure out why I love Buffy so much. To me it comes down to the dialogue, acting, and relationships built between characters. The actors are FANTASTIC. Whedon couldn’t have cast a better bunch. And they are all truly likeable (Buffy could easily be an irritating-as-hell Mary Sue, but the actress and dialogue combine to make her a really enjoyable character). While the dialogue is artificially clever, it’s still really fun and you can really relate to the relationships the characters form with one another. Another, more minor thing, that I enjoy about the series is how many common tv tropes are turned on their head, for example:

Cordelia and Wesley having their romantic moment of breathless dialogue in the library, followed by a terrible kiss and Cordelia basically saying, “Yeah, so . . .enjoy England”

So what do you like about this show? The more specific the better!

2

Well, I enjoy the flavour of dialogue, because it’s basically mine, so I instantly clicked with that.

Also, I enjoy its self-awareness. I knew I was going to love the show by an early episode about a ventriloquist’s dummy. I expected it to go the usual way (having read the Goosebumps books, being aware of Child’s Play, Are You Afraid Of the Dark, the Twilight Zone episode, etc) but they did something completely different, while being aware of the expected tropes.

3

It used its supernatural premise to frame the angst of growing up; it flipped the traditional power dynamic to have the Damsel be the Hero; the stories were told and the characters developed with good craft and it presented deceptively silly dialogue that was in fact really well done. What’s not to love?

4

Oh, that too. The show is actually relatively realistic in that the characters display the cumulative effects of their various traumas and constant “adventures”. By the final season Buffy probably has multiple personality disorders including PTSD and a messiah complex as a result of the sheer pressure of being the “chosen one” for the better part of a decade. That’s pretty uncommon in fiction, I think.

5

Derp… that’s multiple personality disorders as in several personality disorders, not, like, multiple personalities. :smack:

6

Buffy introduced me to my wife, so there is that going for it.

7

James Marsters signed my daughter’s Barney doll, so there’s that.

I fell in love with BtVS with Once More with Feeling. A great episode that I called the single best episode of TV that I’ve seen. And I still stand by that assessment, though some of S3 of Friday Night Lights comes close.

Also, it had, hands-down, the single most attractive female cast in the history of television. :slight_smile:

8

My favourite episode is practically the polar opposite of Once More with Feeling: Hush.

9

For me:
Good dialogue.
Adventures as Metaphors
Character development

10

Okay, I’ll bite - how so?

11

If I had to choose one reason, it would be the humor. Most shows that deal in melodrama tend to reduce their characters to nothing more than delivery vehicles for melodrama. Spending an hour of a TV show or movie with a child dying of cancer typically has no no emotional effect on me. It’s usually too obvious that the writers and producers are trying to manipulate an emotional response out of me, and thus I find it hard to care about them. Joss Whedon shows have no shortage of melodrama. However, his shows do a fantastic job of allowing the characters to joke around and observe the humor in their situations, even when those circumstances are pretty damn bleak. Consequently, I am able to bond with those characters and when bad things happen to them, I actually care. To me, that’s the most remarkable aspect of Buffy and Whedon’s other shows.

Now, the problem is that Whedon’s gotten a bit predictable in how he doles out suffering to his characters. We can pretty much expect disaster to befall any happy relationship and the most likable characters to meet tragic ends.

12

This. They had some great characters and some good writing, epecially early on, and as someone said, the show was very self-aware. I was hooked when they were chasing some baddy and someone issued the classic horror movie suggestion: “Hey, let’s split up - it’s faster!” Willow, standing there alone, says “Yeah, but it’s not safer.” In fact, it was Willow’s quiet, smart dialog that made up a lot of the show for me. Doppelgangland where she literally has an evil twin (“Huh, I guess vampires really don’t have to breathe. Oh, look at those!”), the ep where she becomes a ghost on Halloween (Giles: “Er, the ghost of what, exactly?” and Willow’s “Why couldn’t she have dressed as Xena?”), and the one where she and Anya release a troll (“And we’re, what, surprised by this?”) are my favorites .

The geologist was killed because he could identify the demon the Mayor would become, btw.

13

We both frequented a Buffy-centric board. She admired my wit and insight. I admired her good taste. :stuck_out_tongue:

What started on the board led to chats, then phone calls, then flights across the country. Ten years later we are still fans and still delerious about each other.

14

My favorite part is that the nastiest monsters are never the supernatural ones.

The mayor is not scary when he is making pacts with Eldritch Evil. He is scary when he is acting like an everyday ordinary corrupt politician.

In one episode, some frat-boys drug Cordelia and carry her to a bedroom upstairs. Then they mention that they have to sacrifice a virgin to their demon lord. The supernatural element is actually a relief, because we know how that scene would have ended in real life.

In “Go Fish”, The worst part is not that the swim team’s steroids are turning them into creatures from the black lagoon. The worst part is that the coach and the principal are so eager to have a winning team that they don’t care.

In “Ted”,The scariest part is not when he turns out to be an evil robot. That actually comes as a relief, because then Buffy can destroy him with a clear conscience. The scary part is when he is acting like an ordinary human abusive stepparent.

15

Mrs Beasley was cute.

:smiley:

16

You also have to admire a series that kills off a credited player in the first episode. In fact, making it to the title credits is a bad thing in the Buffyverse.

17

The Mayor was a great villain - none of the usual Evil Overlord crap where he kills as many of his people as the good guys, rants all the time. And he didn’t have to - just looking displeased made everyone around him nervous. And it didn’t hurt that Faith become much cooler once she was his minion.

“Where’s the courier?”
“I made him an offer he couldn’t survive.”

18

“My god, what a feeling. The power of these creatures. It suffuses my being. I can feel the changes begin. My organs are shifting, merging, making ready for the Ascension. Plus these babies are high in fiber, and what’s the fun of becoming an immortal demon if you’re not regular, am I right?”

19

My favorite scene with the mayor is when he’s crossing items off his “to-do” list. Something like:

Greeting Scouts, done
Plumber union reschedule, done
Call temp agency, done
Become Invincible, done
Meeting with the PTA,
Haircut

20

The comparison to “Community” is a good one. Both shows are deeply aware of their genres - which isn’t merely to say that they are self-aware. The characters themselves are indeed more self-aware than your average television protagonists, but it’s the writers who bring “genre-savvy” to a new level on both shows. Whedon and Harmon know their filmmaking tools and tropes, and are experts both at subverting them to create audience surprise and wielding them directly for maximum emotional impact.

(My sense of Dan Harmon is that he’s basically a younger Whedon with big-time neuroses - Joss actually seems well-adjusted, for all that he puts his characters through hell, whereas Harmon is pretty obviously working through some stuff.)