Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The cult surrounding the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is massive. However, there are still many cultured citizens who haven’t bothered to check in. Ethan hadn’t been curious about the show because Sarah Michelle Gellar is a blue-ribbon representative of a common character.
This type of character (air-brushed blonde California trite glossy “high-school popular” rich etc.) appears regularly on American TV and is usually extremely banal. But Kitty Taurus turned on E’s wife Sarah Deming on to BtVS last year, and Sarah finally coaxed Ethan into watching an episode recently. He has now seen seven episodes. It turns out that Buffy’s apparent banality (and the confirmed banality of her suburban California environment) is a marvelous framing device for a well-written soap opera dealing with the occult and supernatural. It is easily one of the all-time great TV shows.
The joy of a soap opera is the long line: the audience gets enough hours with the cast to learn innumerable complexities of many characters. As the soap amasses more details, developments, and back-story, the viewer’s emotional investment in the show deepens.
The writers of a soap are sweating on a treadmill to keep those details, developments and back-story coming week after week, and they face two big problems. One problem is getting characters on and off the series, for no soap has ever had a consistent cast in multiple seasons. (Actors quit. Fans don’t like a character. A new love interest is needed.) The other is creating new plot lines, since they run out fast. Love/sex is the most important theme, but it only takes a couple of seasons to have all the characters bed all the other characters. If the show is popular and running for a while, eventually the writers are forced to use non-sequiturs to create new plot possibilities (e.g., a previously unknown bad apple of the family shows up and threatens blackmail about a long-forgotten secret). If too many non-sequiturs happen in a row, the fabric of the show begins to get really flimsy. (Sometimes the show gets really outrageous and jumps the shark.)
The writers of BtVS are elegantly freed from both awkward casting management and awkward plotting by using magic and the supernatural. Cast changes and plot lines are not hamstrung by the rules of the real world.
Imagine the writer conference about Buffy’s second boyfriend, Riley:
It’s time for Riley to go. It would be best for him to leave with Buffy feeling guilty and unsure of herself, as that would set up her next romantic interactions appropriately. Riley is a gorgeous, smart athlete who would do anything for the heroine. How are we going to do this? Could we make him unfaithful?
In a normal soap, having Riley cheat on Buffy would make him unforgivably unsympathetic or even worse, cast doubts on Buffy’s performance between the sheets. However, since it’s BtVS:
We can make him unfaithful not by sex, but by having his blood sucked out in small amounts by Vampire whores, because Riley feels that Buffy doesn’t need him enough. And when Buffy decides she will forgive him, we can send him to war in South America (Riley is part of a secret Government department that battles the supernatural) and Buffy can be left only with her self-reproach and no way of contacting him. Riley was in the wrong, but not really badly in the wrong, so we can keep her sad about him for at least the rest of the season.
In BtVS, characters gracefully arrive, leave, and return again changed by supernatural means. A little sister would be nice, but Buffy didn’t have one. Bing! Now she does, since the Monks have cast a spell on everyone’s memory. (Creating a sister from thin air would take a lot more work on Beverly Hills 90210.)
As for generating plot, the BtVS writers have it really easy. Not only do they have the constant battles with Vampires to move things along, they have anything else they can think of. Within a few episodes of season 5, there are all the normal devices of teen soap operas: break-ups and hook-ups, family trouble, illness, conflicts between friends, schoolroom antics, and mentor/student relationships. But there are also outer space creatures, cybernetics, demonology, and costume drama (vampires are immortal, so we see long flashback scenes with Spike in Victorian London, China, and 1970’s New York). The writers have it easy, but they challenge themselves too. Thanks to demonic spells, there is a silent episode, where nobody speaks, and a musical theater episode, where everybody sings.
The X-Files was sort of a precedent for BtVS, but on The X-Files, Mulder and Scully’s relationship (the long-running soap opera) firmly took a back seat to fighting baddies (and trying to find out the truth about aliens). BtVS has way more soap opera, especially of the "teen" variety. There are many scenes on BtVS that would fit right in on teen soaps like The O. C. or even Dawson’s Creek. But don’t worry if you find the thought of having to sit through a scene reminiscent of Dawson’s Creek nauseating, because those scenes don’t last long. Pretty soon a howling, vicious vampire will burst on to the set, chewing furniture and people alike, and the Slayer will draw her stake and kill.
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BtVS was created by Joss Whedon and ran seven seasons, ending in 2003. Each season has an arc, and the whole show has an arc. It is a rare example of a great show that did not outstay its welcome.
The Wikipedia entries on both Whedon and BtVS are very good. From the Whedon entry: "Whedon has been described as the world's first third-generation TV writer. He is the son of Tom Whedon, a successful screenwriter for The Electric Company in the 1970s and The Golden Girls in the 1980s, and the grandson of John Whedon, a writer for The Donna Reed Show in the 1950s." Whedon understands the language of TV; it’s in his blood. His statement at the 2002 Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is crucial to the appeal of BtVS:
“The very first mission statement of the show, the whole original idea ...is the joy of female power; having it, using it, sharing it.”
There are many other BtVS links. This one is really serious, and shows how seriously people take their Buffy.
