The show rewards the careful viewer. The dialogue is both snappy and not dumbed down. After Buffy issues a harsh, not-so-inspiring speech before an upcoming battle in which the odds are against the gang, Spike dryly notes, “Well, not exactly the St. Crispin’s Day speech, was it?”
Giles replies, “We few, we happy few.”
Spike adds: “We band of buggered.”
It’s a litereary allusion probably above the heads of many watchers, but the show didn’t have a network exec peering over their shoulders and telling them that no one would understand that, so leave it out.
Now I want to go resurrect the Buffy quote thread and play some more…
My favorite subtle dialog moment was when Buffy confronted some guy by pointing a crossbow at his head and said, “Don’t make me go all William S. Burroughs on you.” She waited for the smirks of acknowledgment, but everyone looked at her blankly, so she rolled her eyes and said, “Am I the only one who didn’t sleep through English class?”
It made my smirk of acknowledgment even sweeter.
And while Gellar wasn’t always a great actress, her performance in the original Buffybot episode was great: there’s a scene in which Sarah Michelle Gellar is pretending to be Buffy who is pretending to be a robot who is pretending to be Buffy, and Gellar manages to convey all those layers of pretense perfectly, so well that I found myself thinking, “Man, Gellar sure can’t act like a robot very well!” before I remembered that she was the one who had actually played the robot in previous scenes.
If you want to see why the show is so popular, I highly recommend seeking out the fourth-season episode “Hush.” It’s what I used to convert people to loving the show, and it was always successful.
Kids’ programs do not generally deal with homosexuality in a mature (yet hot) manner, do not generally deal with the death of a parent in an excruciating manner, do not usually deal with many of the themes that pervaded the show. And no other show has ever featured a despicable, terrifying villain who loved Marmaduke.
Which episodes did you see?
Some of them were pretty bad, it’s true, but Buffy at its finest was fine indeed.
I had friends who watched Buffy while it was airing, and I made fun of them to no end about it. The show seems so silly on the premise alone.
I was sick at home for two weeks last fall, and daytime TV being what it is, I ended watching an episode of Buffy (Conversations with Dead People) and it just hooked me. I went out and bought the whole series and over a month watched the whole thing. It was like reading a book that way, and was very enjoyable.
Like everyone else here I recommend you borrow a few DVD’s and check it out, I dont think you will be sorry for it!
Tell you what Lou, you reply for me in future when someone asks me a question.
You seem to know my motivations exactly :wally For Left hand of Dorkness:
When it was first shown on the BBC in Britain it was on at 6.20pm.
I assume it must have been cut to make it more child friendly from what you’ve said is in it.
I watched season 1 and didn’t enjoy it, maybe it’s because it was in a time slot that necessitated cutting out the ‘meat’, so to speak, leaving us with a watered down version.
My brother has the dvd’s so I might borrow them so I can judge it in it’s uncut state.
They way the BBC chose to classify it has bugger all to do with what its creators intended for it. For all that matters, they could have said it was a cooking show. I do know that before long, one of those channels started airing it late on Friday nights (10 or 11PM, I think) and it became a huge cult hit among British teens and adults.
Um . . . I like the show well enough, but don’t love it. The best episodes are truly good TV. The worst episodes are campy but still better than anything Tony Danza has ever done. But it sure looks to me like Arch Trout’s conclusions were not unreasonnable to the information he had at the time (if uttered without much tact). If the program was marketed as a children’s program in his country, then why would he conclude otherwise? It seems a bit unreasonable to exect him to have sought out interviews with teh creator of a show that he does not like.
> TWEEEET! < ::: Moderator bloweth whistle for attention :::
This lack of good manners is inappropriate for this forum. Here we discuss arts and entertainment in a polite, well-mannered tone, respectful of other posters.
Fair enough (and I don’t think you’re being jerky, for what it’s worth). Season one isn’t my favorite; for my money, the show really came into its own in season 3, and remained fantastic for seasons 3, 4, and 5. It does sound as if the BBC may have butchered the show, so it’d be a good idea to judge it on the DVDs if you’re interested in giving it a fair shake. Episodewise, again, I highly recommend season 4’s episode “Hush,” which has one of the more inventive premises I’ve seen on an hourlong television show: for about 2/3 of the show, there’s no spoken dialog at all (discounting a few seconds of a newscaster’s voice). The ways in which Whedon manages to communicate his trademark sparkling dialog without actually using dialog is wonderful to watch.
There are plenty of good moments in the show. One of the great features of the show is that Whedon doesn’t shy away from hurting his characters; too many television directors want all problems to be wrapped up in an hour, and Whedon doesn’t play that way. Really bad things happen, and they stay bad. And that’s cool.
And my big criticism of the show (of Whedon’s storytelling in general, actually) is that too many of the problems are the result of characters not talking to one another. By the third time that everyone’s almost died because someone didn’t mention something important, you’d think they’d have a policy of keeping daily journals that they pass around. But no.
