Buffy the Vampire Slayer at 20 | Hacker News Reader

Buffy the Vampire Slayer at 20

theguardian.com

60 pointsohjeez44 comments

I've been a fan of Buffy since it aired. It certainly was amazing.

At the same time, I feel the article goes a bit overboard with "birth of TV as art". For example, you can go back earlier to Twin Peaks as raising the bar for TV to the level of art. Other shows have gotten similar acclaim.

Not to diminish Buffy, it's a classic and it certainly transcended the "teen entertainment" genre.

> You can go back even earlier to Twin Peaks

Yep. Or Homicide: Life on the Street.

Another good example is Oz (which coincidentally started and ended the same years as Buffy).

I remember stumbling across Oz late one night not knowing anything about it and thinking "whoa. This is different..."

But - as others have said - there is a gradual evolution. The trend in TV content didn't have a miraculous genesis. There's amazing stuff going back much earlier - it depends on what factors you are including.

the 4th dimension?

the prisoner?

The Prisoner (and US series Nowhere Man) is great.

Do you have a link for 4th Dimension? Is it a UK TV series? Available on DVD, streaming or ..?

The Twilight Zone?

Looney Tunes?

I think the thing with "Buffy..." is that over the 7 seasons it moves from more-or-less a series of self contained episodes to full season length arcs. This was a broader trend in TV as we moved towards box set binging and then on-demand viewing and I think it's key to Buffy's place in the TV canon that not only is it well written gripping and bold TV but it speaks to -- and seems to crystallise -- broader cultural trends in TV consumption.

Other shows had moved in this direction (eg. the Star Trek franchise esp. over the span of DS9) but none I think as fully or as satisfyingly as Buffy did.

Babylon 5 did the full series arc before Buffy, as did Earth 2, and space: above and beyond, though those series were less successful.

Likely because sci-fi seems to be a hard sell in general. They are likely to be expensive to make (can't just rent a school for a vacation to shoot some scenes, or reuse some generic back lot) and appeal to a narrower audience.

Buffy was basically suburban/teen drama with some supernatural/horror comedy spoofs tossed on top.

sorry, the punctuation was unclear. I meant to imply that B5 was successful. I'm not personally a huge fan of B5 (just kind of like it so-so), but the series did spin off several telefilms and at least one series. The series was also not too expensive to make because of heavy use of CGI.

Oddly, "what about Twin Peaks" was my immediate thought as well. I'm guessing that if I were older, I'd probably have thought of an even earlier example.

Still, there was definitely a change from the way TV told stories in the 90s to the way it tells them now, and I think that the article is right about Buffy being an early part of that.

I do remember watching Twin Peaks, it was certainly odd. Quite a few X-Files episodes had this same oddness as well. I think X-Files also made the whole supernatural thing popular in the 90's and I remember that by the time Buffy came along it was pretty much hyping.

It took me the longest time to start watching it because I had it classified as a teenage girl tv series. It does get crincy in some places, but it is definitely awesome.

There is an episode in the first season with a demon inside a computer, and they have to figure out if one of the cast is at home, so they call her landline(!) because if they don't get a busy signal, she isn't on the internet - talk about a blast from my youth.

Well said. Everybody has demons. The conceit of Buffy is that the demons exist, physically, and can be punched in the face. But they're still metaphorical demons. It's brilliant.

One of the many reasons "Angel" didn't work. At all.

Season 5 has some corporate metaphors, after the production team was no longer spread across Buffy, Angel & Dollhouse. Angel S5 is almost a standalone series.

Season 4 also had the "needs of the many vs. needs of the few" and "is ignorance bliss" themes going on.

Didn't Dollhouse air years after Angel was over? I don't recall an overlap. Do you mean Firefly?

I don't recall details, but the Dollhouse set was reused for the law office in Season 5 of Angel.

Angel ran from 1999 to 2004. Dollhouse ran from 2009 to 2010.

Dollhouse production didn't start until years after Angel ended; if any set was shared, it was sets from Angel used for Dollhouse.

(Or Joss had access to an actual time machine, which seems unlikely.)

My mistake. Looks like both sets were designed by Stuart Blatt.

That's fighting talk where I come from, please explain why "Angel" didn't work?

Smiling as I write this, not flaming

At the time of airing of both shows, I watched only a few episodes of Buffy vs all of Angel. Angel worked for me, Buffy not so much.

However, I am planning to binge on Buffy in the near future and then re-up on Angel right after. I do not guarantee I'll change or stay the same, but I am open to either.

This was the premise of the 1978 UK cult classic, _Monkey_, which was a low budget Chinese comic adaptation of _Journey to the West_, dubbed --- poorly --- into English with ludicrous cod-Chinese accents. The Stone Monkey, a pig man, a swamp thing, and a dragon pretending to be a horse accompany a saintly monk on a never-ending journey to India, encountering demons of the mind and then beating the crap out of them.

And it is brilliant (for certain specialist definitions of the word 'brilliant').

Who can forget The Buffy Singalong? Considered one of the best Buffy episodes written (by most top 10 lists), fans would attend a screening and sing along with the show. I attended it in Houston and there were several hundred people there watching it outdoors on a giant inflatable movie screen. Lots of fun if you're into that sort of thing.

http://www.geekpittsburgh.com/joss-whedon/buffy-sing-along

It should have ended with the 3rd season. The 4th season was directionless, the 5th season was ok, the 6th season again went nowhere (not to mention the stupid magic-as-drug subplot and Tara's death), and that's when I stopped watching.

But my life would be empty without being made aware of Michelle Trachtenberg

7 had it's moments, an improvement on 6.

I agree on most of that. 4 suffered heavily from not really having a big bad, it was too introspective. They brought in that weird military monster near the end, but it was too late to bring it all back together. Five improved by focusing on Glory, but 6 again had no real villain to bring it all in. The first part focused on 'the trio', which was laughable, and then yeah the magic-as-a-drug crap. 7 did much better by having a real villain again, even if it felt a little disjointed by trying to wrap everything up neatly.

Tara's death is the only time I've literally screamed out loud watching a television show. It was devastating. And absolutely brilliant TV - completely made Willow's following behavior completely understandable.

Season 5, where Dawn appeared (confusing me to no end - I was like, hold on, it's impossible that i've missed an episode, but this is making no sense at all...) shook things up and was great.

I assumed I had missed something, so I went and looked it up and it spoiled half that seasons arc. Still a great show.

Art is what you can get away with. -- Andy Warhol

Out of curiosity, why is such an article flagged on HN?

I think Buffy doesn't age that well, really. Most anything involving Angel is especially bad.

I watched the first episode of Buffy and thought Rick Astley was going to pop out of a high school locker

Bunch of horny teenagers and older people thinking their coming of age tv show is art. Hello! There were great tv shows before that!

I could never get past Joss Whedon's inability to write dialog.

Really? I find that his ability to write dialogue, especially in the context of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was unmatched. Look at the influence the way they speak has on language and pop culture references. A lot of the idioms and jokes began with things he wrote. I think that's a fairly reasonable marker in the "Joss Weedon is pretty good at writing dialogue" column.

IMNSHO.

Edited to add: Made changes for clarity.

Whendon writes dialog with a very specific and intentional style. You may or may not like that style, but I think it's unfair to claim he cannot write dialog.

I think you might be a little too critical, but overall I think you're closer to the truth than the article.

For example, Charmed [1] was on around the same time as Buffy, and shared many elements (positive critical reception, fantasy used as metaphor for real-life problems, strong female characters, etc.). I think it's hard to say that Buffy is "the birth of TV as art" and Charmed isn't. More fair to say that both were good shows, and influenced the genre.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charmed

Charmed is a lot more stylistically conventional than Buffy. I don't think it makes sense to call either "the birth of TV as art"—TV has always been a medium for (heavily commercialized) art—but I think that there are substantial contrasts between. Buffy and Charmed as examples and influences in TV-as-art.

I don't remember the show well enough right now, but I feel like Xena sorta "went there" too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com