20 years ago today ...

[calimac]

... as various articles have been reminding us, was the premiere of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was not an event I paid any attention to at the time.

I was never interested in the sort of movies that Joss Whedon was guying by making a girl called Buffy into a vampire slayer, and for many years television and I had not gotten along. Every time I wandered into the living room and caught bits of some show that B. was watching, within 15 minutes I was making so many sarcastic remarks that I would leave before I was kicked out.

So for two years I resolutely ignored everything that B., and my old confederate DGK, and various others were saying about how great this program was. What I finally wandered in to the living room and watched was the last part of "Faith, Hope and Trick," which was the third episode of the third season. It actually looked kind of interesting, and I started paying more attention, and gradually figuring out who the characters were.

The episode that really sold me on Buffy was "Doppelgängland," the 16th of the season. I'd seen the previews the previous week. I'd figured this episode was going to be pure fan service for the boys who wanted to see Alyson Hannigan in leather again. I rolled my eyes. But it was so clever, with Hannigan not only playing two disparate roles, but also playing each of them trying, and trying unsuccessfully, to impersonate the other. I can't resist that sort of acting coup, or the level of wit involved. (Not the only time that kind of wit would succeed on Buffy.) Meanwhile, I was also getting caught up in the drama of the increasingly unstable Faith and the increasingly sinister Mayor Wilkins.

I was hooked. I'd drunk the Buffy Kool-aid. Now it was the turn of some other people to be dismayed. As was proven the year an episode was nominated for the Hugo and almost all the voters ranked it either first or not at all, you either loved the show or hated it.

And, by the end, it took some effort to keep loving it. The last season and a half were spun out to lengths far beyond any sinew in the material. But, at its best, it was transcendently good. It's stuck with me. I've even quoted from Buffy in my concert reviews. ("Reduced to the compass of two pianos, the terrifying Rite of Spring makes the listener want to pat it on the head and coo, 'Who's a little fear demon?'")

I'll tell you my pick for the single best moment in Buffy. It was near the beginning of the musical episode, "Once More with Feeling." Special musical episodes have a mixed history in television. They can be great, or memorably awful. I wondered which this one would be. Buffy is singing her first song, "Going Through the Motions." Just watch it. It's at 2:08. And it rhymes. At that moment, I knew we were going to be in good hands for the rest of the episode, and oh, were we.

The articles say that Buffy kicked off a Golden Age of television. Has it? I watched Angel ... for a while. I watched Veronica Mars ... for a while. People said it was the show for people who missed Buffy, and I could see the resemblance, but it just wasn't anywhere near as good. Except for Firefly, which I adore even more than Buffy, nothing I've seen since then has matched it. Even shows I did tag along with for a while, like Castle or Jane the Virgin, just didn't win my loyalty. They offered no Kool-aid. We binge-watched the first two seasons of Orphan Black on DVD, and loved the acting, similar to Buffy body-switching episodes at their best, but felt bludgeoned by the screenwriting.

Sorry, there's nothing else like the best. I have complete sets of five TV programs on DVD on my shelves:
The Prisoner
Monty Python's Flying Circus
Fawlty Towers
Firefly
and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Me, too, re: Buffy. And I also knew we were in for something amazing with the musical as Buffy sang "Going Through the Motions," but not because it rhymed. I have a huge weakness for musicals and expected to like it, but I thought it was going to be one of those episodes that's a romp off to the side of the story arc. I didn't expect anything more. But it informed and enlightened the story arc *brilliantly.*

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the only TV program I have all episodes for on DVD (or any medium, actually). The Australian DVDs for the first 4 seasons or thereabouts, IIRC.

Thanks for your post. I hadn't seen any of the articles about the 20th anniversary being today. Where the heck did all those years go?

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I loved how the musical actually took the plot forward, and in fact brought together numerous strands and brought them out into the open for the first time.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I remember we watched the first episode as a family, and we all voted no. It wasn't funny like the movie had been. The writing was clunky.

But years went by, and my co=writer on projects, who had been exactly the right age for Buffy (she was in college when it first aired) convinced me to stick it out through the monster of the week early seasons, and see if I didn't take off with it when season three hit, and Whedon was able to break television's hard rule about episodes (depositing everyone at the starting point over and over, so that syndication could show the eps out of order over summer) and started a continuous storyline.

I do think that that changed television in a big way, but Buffy happened to be the first. The signs were there that it was coming, if nothing else, in the technology, what with taping and episode buying. No longer were viewers held to the old rules: new season starts with the school year, syndicated reruns over summer.

I got really into it, as she predicted, though the last couple years were pretty painful. I also watched Angel, and that cured me of any further interest in Whedon.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Buffy wasn't the show that invented arc television. I think Twin Peaks did that. It was a well-established notion by the time of Babylon 5, which did it extensively, and that also pre-dated Buffy. In some more recent shows it's gone way too far: the series arc has taken over completely, there's no episode plot structure at all, and each "episode" is merely a slice out of a larger drama. I binge-watched the first season of Breaking Bad (it was very well done, but I didn't want to see any more), and it struck me as a somewhat flabby but otherwise good 5-hour movie, not a TV season at all.

In Buffy, even season 1 had an arc, though that plot thread wasn't always prominently featured. Season 2 had a very strong arc, as strong as Season 3's, and better than the later seasons, even the otherwise good 4 and 5, where the arc story was too drawn out and sluggish, trying to pace time so it wouldn't end too soon. But even the last season had some stand-alone episodes that didn't advance the arc plot at all.

I agree that Angel ran off the rails. And much of Whedon's later TV work has been either terrible or only of interest to superhero buffs. But he's done three other things since that are as good as Buffy and should not be missed due to prejudice: Firefly (which is only 14 episodes), Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (which is only 40 minutes), and Much Ado About Nothing (the finest film adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy - a very hard thing to do well - that I've ever seen). The last is, of course, nearly pure comedy, and the others have many funny parts too.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I do enjoy Firefly. I haven't seen any of the others. I'll have to try the Shakespeare. Thanks!

[eddyerrol.livejournal.com]

I've never seen Buffy, but I loved Firefly and Dr. Horrible. Have you ever seen Flight of the Conchords? If not, you might enjoy it.

[andrewducker]

I was the same with Buffy - I think it was up to season 4 before I finally saw a whole episode of it, because my friends who were recommending it also recommended many, many terrible shows. And it was a delightful surprise to discover that, actually, it was really good.