When TV Became Art: What We Owe to Buffy

[Atlantic Islander]

This was the decade in which television became art. So argues Emily Nussbuam in a recent New York Magazine essay, “When TV Became Art”. She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a pivotal age for TV and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in the development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all in all, the finest decade for great television.

Others have argued that TV had arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling numbers) arguing for the fifties, based on the series that presented staged plays for a television audience, including such original masterpieces as “Twelve Angry Men”, written by Reginald Rose for Studio One, and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, written by Rod Serling for Playhouse 90. Later, Robert J. Thompson, in his widely cited Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, argued for the eighties as the crucial period. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side; it is difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that emerged in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past ten years is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows from all previous decades combined.

Nonetheless, I want to take issue with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the overall picture up into decade-sized blocks obscures the reality. I believe that one can point at a precise point where TV became art, and that point was the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one questions the enormous influence that Joss Whedon’s quirky series exerted on other shows, but I do not believe that many people realize the degree to which it altered the TV landscape. TV was not art before Buffy, but it was afterwards.

In contrast, the show that Nussbaum promotes as the apex of TV as Art, The Wire, has not actually played a crucial role in that development. The Wire is a beneficiary of the birth of TV as art, a promulgator of that development, not its cause. There is no question it is a truly great show, but it really did nothing to change TV. Television had already changed, and we largely have Buffy to thank for that. To be fair, Nussbaum does mention Buffy and Joss Whedon frequently in her essay, obviously crediting both the show and the creator for much of the best that the decade had to offer, but she seems to imply that TV as art was a work in progress as the decade began and it most definitely was not.

Although many realize just how revolutionary Buffy was as a series and the impact that it made on the medium (many TV creators site it as their favorite show while others acknowledge its direct influence), not everyone is aware of how groundbreaking the series was or of the number of concrete changes it wrought on television. It was not merely a great TV series in its own right, it helped redefine what TV could do. Let me enumerate some of the changes made, all of them rather substantial.

One of the most important changes that Buffy brought about was a new understanding of long story arcs on TV. A very brief history of narrative on television is in order to provide a context for my point. For most of the history of television, the format of series was episodic. On almost all shows (excepting soap operas), no matter what happened on one episode of a series, the next week would witness a complete reset. If James West was beaten to a pulp or even shot on The Wild, Wild West, the next week he would be as fine as ever.

No matter what happens on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dick and Laura would never refer to it again. As a result, each episode was self-contained and ignored any kind of narrative order. Watch the episodes of It Takes a Thief in any order that you wish; juxtapose an episode from season four and then from season two and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. This began to change with Hill Street Blues and the shows that Robert J. Thompson applauded: St. Elsewhere, China Beach, L. A. Law, and thirtysomething. For the first time on primetime television, stories got messy and spilled over from one episode to another…

source

[Atlantic Islander]

By Beth MishlerAugust 8, 2012

20 years ago this summer, the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit theaters. Starring Kristy Swanson as Buffy and erstwhile heartthrob Luke Perry, the movie remains nostalgic cheesy fun, even though it never set the world (or movie theaters) on fire with its creative brilliance. It did, however, inspire one of the most critically acclaimed and influential TV shows of all time, which is celebrating its 15-year anniversary. In honor of Buffy Summers and her ragtag posse of Sunnydaleians, we take a look at some of the marks Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer has made on our pop culture landscape.

It redefined the genre mash-up

At a time when Ally McBeal and Friends ruled the airwaves, Buffy came out of nowhere on a network (The WB) that was known for frilly pink shows and gave us a genre-defying surprise. Buffy had elements of fantasy and horror, with magic and portals and vampires and kitten-eating demons (amongst other things). It was always comedic—often hilarious—from Xander’s quips to Anya’s wry observations, to the subtle differences between ‘vengeance’ and ‘justice’ demons.

The show was also a full-fledged drama, however, which can be seen in one of the series’ best episodes, “The Body.” Things never got more real than when Buffy came home to find her mother dead of the most human of causes: a brain aneurism. From episode to episode, Buffy glided in and out of genres with ease, paving the way for shows like LOST and Battlestar Galactica to do the same later.

It’s use of Slanguagee

The dialogue and over-all language used in Buffy influenced the way subsequent shows and their characters communicated. The smart, rapid-fire, pop culture fueled lines Buffy and Co. threw around were later heard again on shows like Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. Some even argue that the show has influenced our cultural lexicon. Seriously, there’s a book about it. Slayer Slang, A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon, by Michael Adams, notes that Buffy introduced several new terms and phrases (the show used Keysar Soze as a verb, for example, or the way characters often made up words, like when Xander called a guilt trip a ‘Guiltapalooza,’ are examples Adams cites). He also notes that the gang made language their own, while also using many familiar phrases, thus creating a new way of speaking.

It has seeped into academia

It’s called “Buffy studies,” and it has its own Wikipedia page. What is it? It’s the collection of scholarly writings on Buffy—and there have been A LOT of serious academic papers written about everything from the elements of feminism to the potent allegory and philosophical possibilities found in the show. Colleges from DePaul to Marquette University have had professors teach courses about the show, or have used it as a teaching tool.

The way it played with and utilized form

Joss Whedon wasn’t the first to think of the self-contained season, but he certainly made it popular by demonstrating how effective it can be to have a different theme each year and begin anew with a whole new set off villains and problems the following season. He also did a musical episode before Glee made it popular to do so, and there’s the revolutionary episode “Hush,” in which spooky floating dudes steal everyone’s voices, and there is zero dialogue for the first 27 minutes. Oh, and Whedon also did crazy things like have random major characters just show up outta nowhere (that would be Buffy’s lil’ sis Dawn, the most divisive TV character since Wesley Crusher). Regardless, most fans and critics agree that Buffy redefined what could be done in an hour long drama.

We see it all the time in other shows

When it aired, Buffy’s romances with vampires Angel and Spike were nothing revolutionary, but they certainly proved that inter-species relationships can be entertaining and moving, (hello, True Blood, The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, etc.), and you cannot sit down and watch an episode of Supernatural without thinking of Buffy. Echoes of Buffy were also heard throughout LOST, particularly in the final season. Take the scene when Jacob uses a bottle of wine as a metaphor for the island and how he must keep the evil of the island corked—that was kinda-sorta-exactly how Giles described Hellmouth, where it was Buffy who had to keep chaos from spilling out. Some have even said that latter-day Dr. Who episodes borrowed from Buffy tonally and thematically, although that’s a different debate for a different day.

What cannot be debated is the show’s lasting impressions on its fans and pop culture in general. Those who wrote for Buffy went on to write for shows including LOST, Battlestar Galactica, Alias, Rome, and Dexter, among others, and even though it has been off the air for nine years, it remains one of the most beloved franchises of all-time.

What do you think is Buffy's biggest influence on today's TV?

source

[Atlantic Islander]

With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. If you watch those 10, you’ll have a better idea of what that series was about, without having to watch the whole thing. These are not meant to be the 10 best episodes, but rather the 10 most representative episodes.

When it debuted in the spring, on an out-of-the-way and tiny network still struggling to forge its identity, the idea that Buffy The Vampire Slayer would become one of the most influential TV dramas of all time would have seemed laughable. Based on a little-seen movie that garnered bad reviews from most critics, the series arrived with no-name stars as a curiosity on The WB, a network best known at the time for a Southern-fried soap named Savannah. Stranger still, the network decided to hand over control of the show to Joss Whedon, the man who wrote the screenplay for the original feature. Whedon’s career as a script doctor—he did an uncredited rewrite on Speed that screenwriter Graham Yost credits with putting most of the quotable lines into the feature—had been wildly successful, and he’d written for TV shows as diverse as Roseanne and the original Parenthood. But he’d never been a showrunner, and he was still very young—in his early 30s—an age when few executives were willing to hand over control of a potentially multimillion-dollar franchise.

Yet by the end of its seven seasons, Whedon and Buffy had reinvented the face of television. Buffy wasn’t a wildly innovative show that was a bolt of creativity out of the blue, like Twin Peaks. Like Hill Street Blues and The X-Files before it, Buffy was really good at synthesis, at pulling together lots and lots of different ideas and strands from the cultural ether and twining them together into something more powerful than its individual elements. Whedon drew on the still-popular X-Files for the series’ genre storytelling, particularly in its early days, and he borrowed a structure that had been primarily popular on the cop show Wiseguy, in which the heroes face off against one primary villain per season, though it was Buffy that gave this idea its most popular name—the Big Bad. Then Marvel comics, cheesy horror movies, and feminist-studies courses were tossed into the mix, and what emerged was indebted to all of those sources but beholden to none of them.

Buffy is perhaps most famous for its adventurousness, on both a plot and stylistic level. The series began as an ultra-low-budget story of a teenage girl who’s a typical high-school student by day and a killer of monsters by night. Played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy goes on a harrowing hero’s journey over the course of the series, starting out as a cockily confident young woman and coming to realize just how hard it can be to have such great weight placed on her shoulders. Most episodes of the show have a random monster or two pop up in Buffy’s city of Sunnydale, California, having been drawn there by the town’s “Hellmouth,” a magnet for beasts and demons of all sorts. Usually, these monsters stand in as metaphors for typical teenage problems. Then, Buffy and her friends—sweetly dorky nerd Willow (Alyson Hannigan), dependably doofy guy-pal Xander (Nicholas Brendon), and school librarian/exposition deliverer Giles (Anthony Stewart Head)—do their level best to destroy said monster. Meanwhile, in the background, the season’s Big Bad would be plotting, sending out minions, and building toward whatever scheme he or she would unleash in the season finale.

Once the template was established in season one, Whedon and his writers—including many names who have gone on to acclaim elsewhere, including Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, and David Fury—almost immediately began picking at it, figuring out how to flip things around to keep the audience on its toes. The show was fond of plot twists, but it almost never used them for their own sake. Instead, the twists were almost always grounded in character, allowing the show to take all of its characters on long, evolution-filled journeys. Characters began a season in one place and ended it in another, and while the growth was over the top, it was nearly always organic. If someone turned evil, it wasn’t because they stumbled upon a magic spell or something similar. It was because they had suffered or been hurt, because they saw no other way through their pain but to force it on the world around them. That applied to the characters’ romantic relationships as well, which often shifted and twisted and turned. Characters explored their sexualities, made ill-advised hook-ups, and destroyed each other via breakups.

As the characters grew older, the series’ concerns matured with them. Plenty of fans found Buffy’s growing darkness—particularly in its final three seasons—off-putting, but Whedon and his writers used the darkening themes to closely parallel the way Buffy and her friends found a world of uncertain responsibility once they left high school at the end of season three. Yet even as this was happening, the series’ stylistic ambitions were expanding. Whedon stepped more and more behind the camera, directing episodes that included one without dialogue, a musical, and a music-free art film. The series remained cuttingly funny throughout its run, but the teen soap crammed with gags from the early seasons gave way to something more brooding and operatic, until the final (and weakest) season posited a battle that was as much for Buffy’s soul as anything else.

Watching just a handful of Buffy episodes isn’t the best way to understand what made the show so influential and so special, simply because so much of its influence stems from the way it used serialization so effectively. Yet the show’s humor, its blend of dozens of genres, and its episode-by-episode plotting are possible to grasp in just one hour of the show, and even a lackluster episode displays the way Whedon and company had fun blowing up what their audience thought it knew about genre TV. And the further along a prospective viewer goes, the more likely it becomes that he or she will land on an episode that reveals just how bold the series could be on a visual level, or how thrilling its stylization could be.

Here, then, are 10 episodes that should entertain the Buffy-curious, though it seems likely sampling a couple of them will turn those intrigued by the series into devotees, devouring every episode over a few weeks.

“Prophecy Girl” (season one, episode 12): The first episode both written and directed by Whedon, the first season finale brings Buffy’s conflict with ancient vampire The Master to a head, complete with numerous terrific quips, a storyline in which the school dance dovetails nicely with the end of the world, and great moments for all of the series regulars, even stuck-up fashion plate Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter). The conflict with The Master is simple enough that newbie viewers should be able to grasp it from this episode alone, and the thrilling fun contained within will likely be enough to give a sense of the series at its early best, when it was still relatively “pure” and before it started unleashing legions of plot twists.

“Surprise” (season two, episode 13): The series’ first great romance was between Buffy and Angel (David Boreanaz), a centuries-old vampire who’d been given back his soul by a gypsy curse that made him lament all of the evil he’d done in his vampire days. In a famous two-parter in the middle of season two, the series took that relationship to the hilt as it pushed the two into conflict with a bad guy named The Judge, who had world-ending aspirations. The script for this episode is by Noxon, who excelled at the kind of soapy relationship twists that kept the series grounded in broken hearts and human pain, and the closer of this episode is a killer, setting up…

“Innocence” (season two, episode 14): The format of TV Club 10 usually precludes selecting two-parters, which take up two spots on the list. Yet “Surprise” and “Innocence” are so important to the show’s development, and the cliffhanger at the end of “Surprise” makes it essential to watch both, in order to understand the show and just for the enjoyment of any prospective viewer. Without spoiling anything, these are the episodes when Buffy “arrived,” both in terms of the public consciousness and when it hit the next level of storytelling, one it would stay at for an impressive amount of time.

“The Zeppo” (season three, episode 13): The series is about Buffy, and the three episodes above are heavily Buffy-centric. Yet the show also had one of the best supporting casts around, and in this episode, regular guy Xander gets a chance to shine, as he gets roped into an adventure that runs parallel to Buffy and the others stopping the usual “end of the world” darkness. This is one of the series’ first tentative stabs at playing around with how it told stories and coming up with ways to make the audience reconsider what it thought an episode of Buffy was. That it’s a top-notch showcase for Brendon—an effortlessly funny actor with the right material—is a bonus.

“Earshot” (season three, episode 18): The third season of Buffy (the final one with the characters in high school) is probably its most wholly satisfying, blending great episodic storylines about the usual concerns of high-school seniors with a terrific Big Bad, a compelling “shadow Buffy” character named Faith, romantic twists aplenty, and a season-long storyline that builds almost perfectly. In the midst of this, though, the season also offers terrific standalone episodes, like this one, penned by Espenson and featuring a briefly telepathic Buffy who can now hear her fellow students’ thoughts. It might be the series’ ultimate affirmation that high school is hell for everyone who has to go through it.

“Something Blue” (season four, episode nine): Season four lacks the compelling macro-narrative that made season three so satisfying, as Buffy and her friends go off to college and the series founders briefly as it tries to figure out how to tell stories about the characters in that setting. (The season also has to work around some cast-change turmoil.) However, on a pure episode-by-episode basis, season four hits a terrific streak very early on, offering up some of the series’ funniest hours over the course of the season. And this is one of them. “Something Blue” probably makes few best-of lists (it has a very silly storyline involving Willow’s wishes coming true), but it shows off the series at the height of its comedic powers and is packed with laughs.

“Restless” (season four, episode 22): Previous Buffy season finales had been giant, action-packed climaxes, but for the fourth season, the series placed all of the action in the penultimate episode, turning this hour over to a ruminative journey through the main characters’ dreams, where they’re stalked by a mysterious, shadowy figure. Written and directed by Whedon, this episode shows off how confident he was in his visual-storytelling abilities, while also offering foreshadowing that depicts much of what’s to come in the following two seasons of the show. As a bonus, it’s deeply insightful about the characters’ psychological make-ups, and it features one of the best one-shot gag characters the show ever came up with.

“Fool For Love” (season five, episode seven): Buffy had two great love interests over the course of the series, Angel (who left for his own show) and Spike. (Season four’s Riley has his good points, but his chemistry with Buffy was always lacking.) Fittingly, both of these men were demons, tortured souls made even more tortured by becoming monsters. The forbidden fruit of Angel made sense for teenage Buffy, but Spike was a love interest worthy of the adult Buffy, who was drawn to him even though she knew she shouldn’t be. In this hour, scripted by series stalwart Douglas Petrie, Buffy turns to Spike for knowledge on how he killed two prior slayers, and James Marsters cements his work as one of the series’ very best performers.

“The Gift” (season five, episode 22): It may not make sense to a viewer who hasn’t seen everything leading up to it—season five is one of the show’s most serialized—but the epic gut-punch of the 100th episode of the show’s run, its fifth season finale, should still maintain its emotional resonance for anyone who’s seen Buffy grow over the previous eight episodes on this list. Buffy and her friends have their final showdown with a god named Glory, Buffy tries to save a sister who only recently popped into existence, and everybody shows hidden depths. The final shot encompasses so much of what made the show great, and it marks a perfect capper to the series’ poppier WB era. (Buffy moved to another fledgling network, UPN, in the next season.) In addition, it plays around with the series’ growing suggestions that the weight of her job had made Buffy seriously depressed, and it gives Gellar a lovely monologue to close things out.

“Once More, With Feeling” (season six, episode seven): In the show’s fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, Whedon took over the writing and direction for one episode, then veered the show into stylistically fresh territory. In season four, that episode was “Hush,” a silent horror tale that may be the series’ scariest episode. In season five, that episode was “The Body,” almost certainly the finest hour the series ever produced (though it’s better to watch once viewers know the characters better). And in season six, that episode was “Once More, With Feeling,” a surprisingly satisfying musical with music and lyrics by Whedon himself. The production numbers are fun, the storytelling is great, and Whedon uses the conventions of the musical—people will reveal more than they normally would in song—for some devastating emotional reveals. It’s the perfect capper to 10 hours of Buffy.

And if you like those, here are 10 more: Because the series worked in so many styles, many of the show’s best hours have been relegated to this section to better make the above 10 representative of the series’ breadth. Those merely interested after the above 10 are strongly advised to give these a shot. “Angel” (season one, episode seven); “Passion” (season two, episode 17); “Becoming (Part 1)” (season two, episode 21); “Becoming (Part 2)” (season two, episode 22); “The Wish” (season three, episode nine); “Hush” (season four, episode 10); “The Body” (season five, episode 16); “Older And Far Away” (season six, episode 14); “Conversations With Dead People” (season seven, episode seven); “Storyteller” (season seven, episode 16).

Availability: All seasons are available on DVD, in a variety of sets. The series is also available to stream in its entirety on Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime. And if none of that works, the series is still in daily cable reruns on Logo. (Logo’s website also has five episodes streaming, but they’re from different seasons, with no rhyme or reason to the episodes chosen.)

source

[Prisoner Of Ice]

I like buffy but this is the most ridiculous fap piece I have ever seen. If anything Joss Whedon's talent is stamina more than anything else, kinda like the sid and marty croft of a new era...certainly not high art ffs

[Atlantic Islander]

I like buffy but this is the most ridiculous fap piece I have ever seen. If anything Joss Whedon's talent is stamina more than anything else, kinda like the sid and marty croft of a new era...certainly not high art ffs

Buffy is a masterpiece.

[Atlantic Islander]

[Atlantic Islander]